ABSTRACT
The role of the electronic chain starting at the transducers’ output and ending at the data acquisition and analysis instruments is that of collecting the often weak and barely detectable measurement signals from sensors and enhancing the useful information content that they carry, while discarding the background components of no interest. This is primarily carried out in the signal-conditioning stage, which is often erroneously regarded as a piece of electronic circuitry which essentially increases the measurement sensitivity by signal amplification. This is only partly true, since the role of the signalconditioning circuits is not merely that of amplifying the signal, but rather that of augmenting the signal magnitude over the background noise.
