Pulse Code Modulation

• The advantages of digital communication systems

(cf. analogue communication)
– Easier to store as a pattern of 1's and 0's
• Increased Immunity

– non-linearities
– Easier to process in computers and digital signal processors
– Can be coded for security and error correction purposes
– Several digital signals can easily be interleaved (multiplexed)
and transmitted on one channel
– Noisy digital signals can be regenerated more effectively than
analogue signals can be amplified.
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 A brief aside about ADCs
• ADCs are used to convert an analogue input voltage into a number that can
be interpreted as a physical parameter by a computer.

0111 Resolution=
0110 1 part in 2n
0100
0101
0011
0010
0001
0000
1111
1110
1100
1010
1101
1011
1001

0000 0110 0111 0011 1100 1001 1011

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Numbers passed from ADC to computer to represent analogue voltage
 Sampling
• The input signal is sampled prior to digitisation and an approximation to
the input is reconstructed by the digital-to-analogue converter:

input

Sampling Digitisation code, modulate

Transmission
•Wire/optical fibre
•Aerial/free-space
Digital-to-analogue
Filtering Demodulate, Decode
conversion

output

3
 Sampling an analogue signal
• Prior to digitisation, signals must be sampled
– With a frequency fs=2B=1/T
• ADC converts the height of each pulse into binary representation
• Sampling involves the multiplication of the signal by a train of sampling
pulses

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 Sampling as multiplication by a sampling
waveform:

• Sampling pulse is
short enough so that
can normally
considered have zero
duration
• DAC, however
produces pulses
length T

• Multiplication = Amplitude modulation

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– Amplitude modulation produces sidebands…
• Sidebands produced by multiplication with a
carrier
– That is, amplitude modulation
6
• Sidebands at each harmonic of the sampling pulse
• Digital-to-analogue conversion involves recovery of the baseband
– How?
7
– What is the minimum value of fs for which there is no overlap of the Harmonics with
the baseband?
• If the sidebands do not overlap the signal 8
can be recovered
• Practical sampling
– the "Sample-and-hold" system:
• This is Nyquist’s theorem
– For a signal of bandwidth B Hz, the minimum sampling
rate is 2B samples/s 9
• Effect of sampling rate
– sampling at more than the Nyquist Rate 10
• Sampling at the Nyquist Rate
11
– cannot build an ideal filter -
• Undersampling –
– produces aliasing distortion! 12
 Aliasing-time domain

Oversampled signal

Reconstructed signal

Undersampled signal

Reconstructed signal 13
Sampling:aliasing & Nyquist:time domain
• The Anti-alias
(Pre-sampling)
filter
– ensures that
sampling
obeys the
Nyquist
theorem

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 Examples
• For the compact disc (Audio CD) the
maximum signal frequency is 20 kHz and the
sampling rate is 44.1 kHz.
– The Nyquist Sampling Rate is 40 kHz
– Hence the guard band is 4.1 kHz wide.
• In the telephone system (see Section 5.8),
the speech signal has a bandwidth up to 3.4
kHz and a sampling rate of 8 kHz,
– The Nyquist Sampling Rate is 6.8 kHz
– Hence the guard band is 1.2 kHz wide.
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 Regeneration v amplification:

• Gain of amplifiers equals loss in transmission lines

• SNR analog: S/kN
• SNR digital: S/N
– In practice finite S/N means there will be a low level of bit errors
– Some accumulation of bit-error noise with repeaters, but much lower16level
than with analogue amplification
• A Pulse-Code Modulation communication
system
– "PCM" 17
A digital communication system - "PCM"
• Anti-alias Filter*
• Digitiser/Sample-and-Hold circuit*
• Analogue-to-Digital Converter*
• Coding-
– Source coding for data compression,
– Line coding for signalling efficiency
– Error coding to reduce the effect of errors
• Modulator
• Physical Channel (with repeaters if necessary)*
– Copper cables
– Fibre Optic cables
– Radio
– Sonar
– Recording medium
• Demodulator
• Decoder (Source-, Line- and Error-)
• Digital-to-Analogue Converter*
• Reconstruction Filter* 18
 Time-division Multiplexing "TDM"
• Allocate interleaved time-slots to each signal
• Assemble the binary coded samples into Frames:
• 2-channel time-division multiplexing scheme:
Frame n Frame n+1
Slot 1 Slot 2 Slot 1 Slot 2
Channel 1 Channel 2 Channel 1 Channel 2
Sample 1 Sample 1 Sample 2 Sample 2

• Two channels share a single physical channel 19

– Cost?
 The 32-channel PCM Transmission system
• 30 speech signals plus two control channels
for signalling and synchronising:
– Signal bandwidth 3.4 kHz
– Sampling rate 8 kHz
• Hence frame length? 125 s
– Sample size 8 bits/sample
• Hence bit rate from each signal 64 kbit/s
– 32 channels
• Hence each time slot 3.906 s
– 1/(8000*32)
– Overall data rate 2.048 Mbit/s
• 8000*32*8 20
21
• A number of frames can be time-division multiplexed
together in a TDM heirachy.
– 4 frames of 32 channels
• = 128 basic PCM channels,
• Has data rate of 4 x 2.048 Mbit/s = 8.192 Mbit/s
– 8.448Mbit/s including extra signalling bits

– 4 x 128 = 512 channels

– Has data rate = 4 x8.192 Mbit/s (+ signalling bits)
• = 34.368 Mbit/s

– etc

– Up to a multiplex of 32768 channels with an overall data

rate of 2.48832 Gbit/s. 22
23
Spectrum of a train of pulses:

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