Modulation Techniques
Modulation Techniques
There are few modulation techniques which are followed to construct a PCM signal. These
techniques like sampling, quantization, and companding help to create an effective PCM signal,
which can exactly reproduce the original signal.
Quantization
The digitization of analog signals involves the rounding off of the values which are approximately
equal to the analog values. The method of sampling chooses few points on the analog signal and
then these points are joined to round off the value to a near stabilized value. Such a process is
called as Quantization.
The quantizing of an analog signal is done by discretizing the signal with a number of quantization
levels. Quantization is representing the sampled values of the amplitude by a finite set of levels,
which means converting a continuous-amplitude sample into a discrete-time signal.
The following figure shows how an analog signal gets quantized. The blue line represents analog
signal while the red one represents the quantized signal.
Both sampling and quantization results in the loss of information. The quality of a Quantizer output
depends upon the number of quantization levels used. The discrete amplitudes of the quantized
output are called as representation levels or reconstruction levels. The spacing between two
adjacent representation levels is called a quantum or step-size.
Companding in PCM
The word Companding is a combination of Compressing and Expanding, which means that it
does both. This is a non-linear technique used in PCM which compresses the data at the
transmitter and expands the same data at the receiver. The effects of noise and crosstalk are
reduced by using this technique.
Uniform quantization is achieved at µ = 0, where the characteristic curve is linear and there
is no compression.
µ-law has mid-tread at the origin. Hence, it contains a zero value.
Differential PCM
The samples that are highly correlated, when encoded by PCM technique, leave redundant
information behind. To process this redundant information and to have a better output, it is a wise
decision to take predicted sampled values, assumed from its previous outputs and summarize them
with the quantized values.