Digital differential analyzer

The primary advantages of a DDA over the conventional analog differential analyzer are greater precision of the results and the lack of drift/noise/slip/lash in the calculations.

For problems that can be expressed as differential equations, a hardware DDA can solve them much faster than a general purpose computer (using similar technology).

[citation needed] The first DDA built was the Magnetic Drum Digital Differential Analyzer of 1950.

If Δy is eliminated, making y a constant, then the DDA integrator reduces to a device called a rate multiplier, where the pulse rate ΔS is proportional to the product of y and Δx by the following equation: There are two sources of error that limit the accuracy of DDAs:[3] Both of these error sources are cumulative, due to the repeated addition nature of DDAs.

On the other hand complex functions and variables like in partial differential equations are easier to simulate on a DDA than on a classical differetnial analyzer or analog computer.