Editing Digital control (section)

{{Short description|Use of digital computers as system controllers}}
{{more footnotes needed|date=September 2020}}

'''Digital control''' is a branch of [[control theory]] that uses [[Digital data|digital]] [[computer]]s to act as system controllers.
Depending on the requirements, a digital control system can take the form of a [[microcontroller]] to an [[Application-specific integrated circuit|ASIC]] to a standard desktop computer.
Since a digital computer is a [[discrete mathematics|discrete]] system, the [[Laplace transform]] is replaced with the [[Z-transform]]. Since a digital computer has finite precision (''See [[Quantization (signal processing)|quantization]]''), extra care is needed to ensure the error in coefficients, [[analog-to-digital conversion]], [[digital-to-analog conversion]], etc. are not producing undesired or unplanned effects.

Since the creation of the [[Atanasoff–Berry Computer|first digital computer]] in the early 1940s the price of digital computers has dropped considerably, which has made them key pieces to control systems because they are easy to configure and reconfigure through software, can scale to the limits of the memory or storage space without extra cost, parameters of the program can change with time (''See [[adaptive control]]'') and digital computers are much less prone to environmental conditions than [[capacitor]]s, [[inductor]]s, etc.