The benefits of using DMA for repetitive data handling are very significant in real world applications. This example shows an instrument that must generate a 32-step, 10kHz sine wave that is to be sent into a sensor. This means that 320k DAC transfers are required. Without DMA, the typical interrupt driven software solution quickly becomes overloaded just managing the serial transfers to the DAC. The DAC Load ISR requires 53 CPU cycles to fetch the required data from a look-up table, increment a pointer, check the pointer for out-of-range data, and load the fetched data – which is equivalent to > 16MIPS.