The EL4712 analog output terminal generates output signals in the range between 0 and 20 mA. The voltage is supplied to the process level with a resolution of 16 bits and is electrically isolated. The output channels have a common ground potential. The outputs are sampled with an adjustable, integer multiple (oversampling factor: n) of the bus cycle frequency (n microcycles per bus cycle). For each bus cycle, the EtherCAT Terminal receives a process data block that is output consecutively. The time base of the terminal can be synchronized precisely with other EtherCAT devices via distributed clocks. This procedure enables the temporal resolution of the analog output signals to be increased to n times the bus cycle time. In conjunction with the EL37xx (analog input terminal with oversampling), responses with equidistant time intervals, e.g. in the event of a threshold value being exceeded, become possible. The EL4712 device can output a maximum of 100,000 values (100 ksamples/s) per channel and second.