[Solved] Strange pin on a DAC..

Other Hardware General Electronics
1

I want to try a DAC AD5663 and going over it's datasheet now.
It's a 16bit dual DAC in a 10 pin package.

On of it's pins is called CLR and this is what the pind description tells about it:
"Asynchronous Clear Input. The CLR input is falling edge sensitive. While CLR is low, all LDAC pulses are ignored. When CLR is activated, zero scale is loaded to all input and DAC registers. This clears the output to 0 V. The part exits clear code mode on the 24th falling edge of the next write to the part. If CLR is activated during a write sequence, the write is aborted."

Thing is.. All the words in the above passage seem familiar, yet the meaning of it eludes me..

Are they basically saying there that I should tie this pin high and forget about it? :smiley:

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2

Are they basically saying there that I should tie this pin high and forget about it?

If you don’t want that feature then yes.

3

Thank you Mike!
This really clears the confusion.

4

It's probably to support emergency stop should the DAC be used to control some output that
might be hazardous - a hardware pin that will force the output to zero immediately irrespective
of what the microcontroller software does. Well that's my guess, given the first suggested application
listed in the datasheet is "process control".