EEE 360 Communications Systems I

Lecture Presentation 10
Aykut HOCANIN
Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Eastern Mediterranean University

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Eastern Mediterranean University

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EEE 360 Communication Systems I

 Pulse Code Modulation (PCM): Section 3.3

Essentially analog-to-digital conversion
The information contained in the instantaneous samples of an analog signal
is represented by digital words in a serial bit stream.
The PCM signal is generated by carrying out three basic operations:
Sampling
The sampling operation generates a flat-top PAM signal. See section 3.2
for the details.
Quantizing
Look at figure 3.8 . Each sample value from the amplitude signal is
assigned to a certain amplitude level.
For a given number of bits n, there are M = 2n levels.
The digital word that represents the amplitude closest to the actual
sampled value is used.
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EEE 360 Communication Systems I

If the steps of the quantizer are equal, then the quantizer is said to be
uniform.
Since the quantizer approximates the actual analog waveform with a
finite number of levels, quantization noise will be introduced.
Encoding
In this step, to each of the quantized PAM signal sample, a digital word
is assigned. The digital word can be binary as well as nonbinary.
Bandwidth of PCM signals
For PAM signaling, the spectrum was obtained as a function of the
spectrum of the original signal since PAM signaling is a linear function of
the analog signal.
This is not true for PCM. PCM is a nonlinear function of the input analog
signal and its spectrum is not directly related to the spectrum of the
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EEE 360 Communication Systems I

original input signal.

The bandwidth of the binary PCM waveforms depends on the bit rate and
the waveform pulse shape used to represent the data.
The bit rate is
R = nfs
(1)
where n is the number of bits in the PCM word (M = 2n) and fs is the
sampling rate.
For no aliasing, from the sampling theorem fs 2B where B is the
bandwidth of the original analog signal.
From the dimensionality theorem, the bandwidth of the binary PCM
waveform is bounded by
1
1
(2)
BP CM R = nfs.
2
2
The above minimum bandwidth is obtained only when sin(x)/x type pulse
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EEE 360 Communication Systems I

shape is used to generate the PCM waveform.

However, usually a more rectangular pulse shape is used. For rectangular
pulses, the first null bandwidth is
BP CM = R = nfs (first null bandwidth).

(3)

Look at Table 3.2 for bandwidth of PCM signals with various parameters.
It should be noted that the bandwidth of the PCM signal is much wider
than the bandwidth of the original signal.
In fact, the lower bound on the bandwidth of the PCM signal is given by
BP CM nB

(4)

where fs 2B and B is the bandwidth of the corresponding analog signal.

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EEE 360 Communication Systems I

Effects of Noise
The analog signal that is recovered at the PCM system output is corrupted
by noise. Two main effects cause this noise:
Quantization Noise
Overload noise
Random noise
Granular noise
Hunting noise
Bit Errors in the recovered PCM signal
channel noise
improper channel filtering.

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EEE 360 Communication Systems I

The signal-to-noise ratios of the recovered analog peak and average signal
power to the total average noise power is given by

2
S
3M

=
N pk out 1 + 4(M 2 1)Pe

(5)

2
S
M

=
N out 1 + 4(M 2 1)Pe

(6)

Pe is the probability of bit error in the recovered binary PCM signal at the
receiver before it is converted back into an analog signal.

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EEE 360 Communication Systems I

Nonuniform Quantization: -Law and A-Law

Companding
In order to match the nonuniform amplitude distribution of the input
signal, nonuniform quantization is used.
The step sizes of the quantizer are not equal.
Look at Figure 3.9 for the compression characteristics of the nonuniform
quantizer .
The effect of nonuniform quantization can be obtained by first passing the
analog waveform through a compression (nonlinear) amplifier and then into
a PCM circuit that uses uniform quantizer. The -Law is widely used in
USA, Canada and Japan where as the A-Law is used in Europe.

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Eastern Mediterranean University

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EEE 360 Communication Systems I