¹⁶Another source of trouble for differentiation of live signals is when the signal originates from a digital sensor. Digital devices, by their very nature, break analog signals into a series of discrete amplitude steps. As a digital process transmitter encounters a steadily increasing or decreasing process variable, its output rises or falls in discrete “jumps” rather than continuously as a fully analog transmitter would. Now, each of these jumps is quite small, but since each one occurs almost instantly it still translates into an extremely large rate-of-change when detected by a differentiator sampling over small time increments or sampling continuously (as in the case of an analog differentiator circuit). This means the problem of false rates-of-change exists even in perfectly noiseless systems, when the detection device (and/or the information channel to the monitoring system) is digital rather than analog.