Atharva Inamdar

What does PCM stand for? Pulse Code Modulation, a way of digitizing analogue signals for
transmission. Like any other communications system, this employs a Source Encoder/Decoder,
Channel Encoder/Decoder.

The Source Encoder:

The first stage is to convert the analogue signal to digital signal. This is done with a sampler and then
a quantizer. The sampler usually works at the Nyquist frequency. So if the highest frequency present
in the signal is Fg, then the sampling is done at atleast 2Fg. We call this the sampling frequency
Fs=2Fg. The quantiser now translates each of the sampled data to binary. First it defines specific
levels called the quantisation levels and assigns each of these levels a unique binary code.

This translation to binary is known as the encoding process. There are various schemes of assigning
binary codes to these levels but the three most popular ones are: Binary Coded Decimal (BCD),
Folded BCD, and Gray Code (GC). Instead of exploring each one of these schemes, we will look at the
generalised system.

Going back to the quantiser, we can learn several important parameters of the system. The
difference between each quantisation level is denoted with a delta, Δ, and the total number of
quantisation levels is Q. The number of bits needed to encode all Q levels is gamma, 𝛾. 𝛾 = 𝑙𝑜𝑔2 (𝑄)
bits per level. From this we can determine our bit rate, 𝑟𝑏 , for the encoder: 𝑟𝑏 = 𝛾𝐹𝑠 . The channel
symbol is a binary code of 𝛾 bits long. The transmission rate is the Channel symbol rate 𝑟𝑐𝑠 calculated
𝑛𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑓 𝑠𝑦𝑚𝑏𝑜𝑙𝑠
as . Let's see an example.
𝑠𝑒𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑑𝑠

A quantiser with 8 levels requires log 2 8 = 3bits per level. Since there are 8 levels there are 8
𝑏𝑖𝑡𝑠
symbols. Let's assume a sampling frequency of 8kHz. So the bit rate 𝑟𝑏 = 3 × 8𝑘 = 24𝑘 . The
𝑠𝑒𝑐
24𝑘 𝑠𝑦𝑚𝑏𝑜𝑙𝑠
channel symbol rate is 𝑟𝑐𝑠 = = 8𝑘 . This is equal to the sampling frequency.
3 𝑠𝑒𝑐

Once we determine the channel symbol rate, we can determine the channel bandwidth, 𝐵𝑃𝐶𝑀 .
𝑟𝑐𝑠 𝑟𝑐𝑠
𝐵𝑃𝐶𝑀 ≥ 𝐻𝑧 in the baseband (no carrier present) and 𝐵𝑃𝐶𝑀 ≥ × 2 𝐻𝑧. 𝐵𝑃𝐶𝑀 ≥ 𝑟𝑐𝑠 is the
2 2
 Atharva Inamdar

𝑐𝑕𝑎𝑛𝑛𝑒𝑙 𝑏𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑤𝑖𝑑𝑡 𝑕 𝐵𝑃𝐶𝑀

bandpass bandwidth. And the bandwidth expansion factor is 𝛽 = = .
𝑚𝑒𝑠𝑠𝑎𝑔𝑒 𝑏𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑤𝑖𝑑𝑡 𝑕 𝐹𝑔
There are three different types of quantisers: Uniform, Non-Uniform and Differential. As you can
guess uniform quantisers have a constant ∆ between each level. With non-uniform quantisers this ∆
varies between each level. Differential quantisers is a combination of uniform or non-uniform
quantiser plus a differential circuit. Here we will consider a special type of non-uniform quantiser
called a Compander.

The Compander

This block diagram shows the structure of a compander. Instead of varying the quantiser levels we
manipulate the input sample and implement a simple uniform quantiser. There are different
compression techniques used. The most popular is the log compression show below for the
transmission and receiver.

Figure (a) shows the compression used in the transmitter and figure (b) shows the expander used in
the receiver. The dotted lines show a comparison to a linear quantiser. In practice a variation of this
is used. In phone networks, there are two popular compander schemes, the 𝜇-law and the A-law.

𝜇-law A-law
𝑔
𝐴 𝑔 1
𝑔𝑚𝑎𝑥
𝑔 𝑔 0≤ <
ln 1 + 𝜇
𝑔𝑚𝑎𝑥 1 + ln 𝐴 𝑚𝑎𝑥 𝑔𝑚𝑎𝑥 𝐴
𝑔𝑐 =
𝑔𝑐 = 𝑔𝑚𝑎𝑥 𝑔
ln 1 + 𝜇 1 + ln 𝐴 1 𝑔
𝑔𝑚𝑎𝑥
𝑔𝑚𝑎𝑥 ≤ <1
1 + ln 𝐴 𝐴 𝑔𝑚𝑎𝑥
 Atharva Inamdar

𝑔 is the compressors input, 𝑔𝑐 is the compressor's output and 𝑔𝑚𝑎𝑥 is the maximum value of of the
signal. In practice, 𝐴 ≅ 87.6 and 𝜇 ≅ 100. These two laws provide performance independent of
signal statistics. We all know that performance measurement is done with the signal-to-noise ratio
(SNR). For comparison purposes, I will first state the SNR of a uniform quantiser.
𝑝𝑒𝑎𝑘
Uniform Quantiser : 𝑆𝑁𝑅 = 4.77 + 6𝛾 − 20 log 𝐶𝐹 𝑑𝐵. 𝐶𝐹 = 𝐶𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝐹𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑜𝑟 =
𝑟𝑚𝑠

𝜇-law: 𝑆𝑁𝑅 = 4.77 + 6𝛾 − 20 log ln 1 + 𝜇

A-law: 𝑆𝑁𝑅 = 4.77 + 6𝛾 − 20 log 1 + ln 𝐴

Related to these SNRs there is a special law relating to the number of bits per quant level and the
scheme performance SNR. This is called the 6dB law. As you can see the second term in the
equations above is 6𝛾, where 𝛾 is the bits per quant level. Thus if the number of bits per quant level
is increased by 1, then the SNR increases by 6dB resulting in a better performance. This can be seen
intuitively by considering that increasing the number of bits by one we double the total count of the
binary number. (with 2 bits we can count upto 4 but with 3 bits we can count upto 8.) Thus the
number of quant levels also double with every bit leading to a more accurate sampling and
translation from analogue to digital. Thus the performance will increase.