Industrial and embedded digital-to-analog converter (DAC) chips
A collection of drivers for digital-to-analog converter chips used in industrial control, instrumentation, signal generation, and embedded analog-output applications. The supported parts span many vendors and connect over buses like SPI and I²C, converting digital values from the CPU into precise analog voltages or currents for sensors, actuators, and process-control equipment.
recommendation
It should stay in the kernel because the directory covers a broad, actively maintained collection of DAC chips from Analog Devices, Microchip, TI, Maxim, ST, NXP and others, with new device support landing as recently as 2025 (for example the AD3530R and MAX22007). Several of the covered parts are still marketed by their vendors as recommended for new designs, so the code serves current industrial and embedded customers, not just legacy hardware.
repository signals
sources
- codebrowser.dev
Mainline Linux still carries a large, actively maintained DAC driver directory under IIO; code browser snapshot was generated on 2026-02-08.
- git.kernel.org
Mainline gained new hardware support in 2025 with the commit "iio: dac: ad3530r: Add driver for AD3530R and AD3531R".
- git.kernel.org
Mainline gained additional new hardware support in 2025 with the commit "iio: dac: Add MAX22007 DAC driver support".
- analog.com
Analog Devices lists AD3530R as "RECOMMENDED FOR NEW DESIGNS" and offers an evaluation board, showing current-market relevance.
- analog.com
Analog Devices lists MAX22007 as "RECOMMENDED FOR NEW DESIGNS" for industrial analog-output applications.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
This is a real driver directory, not helper code. Local `exec_command` inspection of `drivers/iio/dac/Kconfig` showed dozens of supported DAC parts across multiple vendors, and local `git -c safe.directory=... log -- drivers/iio/dac` showed sustained 2025-2026 fixes plus new-device enablement. The two git.kernel.org commit URLs are canonical-recall URLs built from hashes obtained via that local git log. Vendor product pages were obtained via `web.search_query` and show at least some covered hardware families are still sold for new designs in 2025. I attempted lore-first evidence: local `lei` was unavailable, and `web.search_query` against lore returned no obvious removal/deprecation hits, so there is no positive evidence of an upstream removal effort. Because the directory is broad and industrial/embedded rather than mass-consumer, deployments are best rated medium, but the maintenance and hardware lifecycle signals clearly support keep.