PULSE CODE

MODULATION (PCM)
Pulse Code Modulation (PCM)
 Pulse Code Modulation is known as a digital pulse
modulation technique.
 In general, PCM is an Analog to Digital conversion
process, where the information contained in
instantaneous sample of analog signal are represented
by digital codes.
 The basic elements of a PCM system consists of three
main parts:
 PCM Transmitter,
 The Transmission Path or Channel, and
 PCM Receiver
 PCM System
PCM Generator or Transmitter
PCM Transmission Path
 The regenerative repeater performs three basic
operations:
 Equalization,
 Timing, and
 Decision Making
PCM Receiver
Advantages/Disadvantages of PCM
 Advantages:
 PCM provides high noise immunity.
 PCM signal can be stored due to its digital nature.
 Various encoding could be done for secure transmission.
 PCM signals derived from all types of analog sources can be
merged with other data and transmitted on high speed TDM
link.
 CD is one of the application of PCM

 Disadvantages:
 The encoding, decoding and quantizing circuitry is complex.
 PCM requires large bandwidth as compared to other
systems.
Differential Pulse Code Modulation
(DPCM)
 PCM is not a very efficient system because it generates
so many bits and requires so much bandwidth.
 The successive samples of a signal are highly correlated
with each other.
 The value from present sample to next sample does not
differ by large amount.
 When these samples are encoded by a standard PCM
system, the resulting encoded signal contains redundant
information.
 If this redundancy is reduced, then overall bit rate will
decrease and the number of bits required to transmit
one sample will also reduced.
 DPCM works on the principle of prediction.
 The value of present sample is predicted from the past
samples.
 The prediction may not be exact but it is very close to
the actual sample value.
 By performing various iteration makes the prediction
more and more close to the actual sample signal.
 Here,
𝑥(𝑛𝑇𝑠 ) = Sampled Signal, 𝑒𝑞 (𝑛𝑇𝑠 ) = Quantizer output signal gap,
𝑥(𝑛𝑇𝑠 ) = Predicted Signal, 𝑥𝑞 (𝑛𝑇𝑠 ) = Input to prediction filter.
𝑒(𝑛𝑇𝑠 ) = Prediction error,
 Now,
𝑒 𝑛𝑇𝑠 = 𝑥 𝑛𝑇𝑠 − 𝑥(𝑛𝑇𝑠 )

𝑒𝑞 𝑛𝑇𝑠 = 𝑒 𝑛𝑇𝑠 + 𝑞(𝑛𝑇𝑠 )

𝑞(𝑛𝑇𝑠 ) = Quantization Error

𝑥𝑞 𝑛𝑇𝑠 = 𝑥 𝑛𝑇𝑠 + 𝑒𝑞 𝑛𝑇𝑠

= 𝑥 𝑛𝑇𝑠 + 𝑒 𝑛𝑇𝑠 + 𝑞(𝑛𝑇𝑠 )

Here, 𝑒 𝑛𝑇𝑠 = 𝑥 𝑛𝑇𝑠 − 𝑥 𝑛𝑇𝑠 𝑒 𝑛𝑇𝑠 + 𝑥 𝑛𝑇𝑠 = 𝑥(𝑛𝑇𝑠 )

Therefore,
𝑥𝑞 𝑛𝑇𝑠 = 𝑥(𝑛𝑇𝑠 ) + 𝑞(𝑛𝑇𝑠 )
 DPCM Receiver

 The receiver reconstructs the quantized error signal from

incoming binary signal.
 The prediction filter output and quantized error signals are
added to give the quantized version of the original signal.
 The signal at the receiver differs from actual signal by only
quantization error 𝑞(𝑛𝑇𝑠 ).
Adaptive Differential PCM (ADPCM)
 Adaptive DPCM can further improve the efficiency of
DPCM by incorporating an adaptive quantizer at encoder.
 The simultaneous use of adaptive quantization and
adaptive prediction ensures best possible performance.
 The adaptive quantization can be achieved by using a
quantizer with a time varying step size.
 The step size is varied according to the rms value of input
signal or variance of input signal.
 ADPCM performs speed coding at lower bit rate.
 The most common ADPCM speech encoders use 32 kbit/s
standardize by ITU-T as G.726 ADPCM speech codec.
 ADPCM Encoder
Examples
1. A Television signal having a bandwidth of 4.2 MHz is
transmitted using binary PCM system. Given that the
number of quantization level is 512. Determine:
i. Code word length
ii. Transmission bandwidth
iii. Final bit rate
iv. Output signal to quantization noise ratio.
2. The bandwidth of an input signal to the PCM is
restricted to 4 kHz. The input signal varies in amplitude
from -3.8V to +3.8V and has an average power of
30mW. The required signal to noise ratio is given as
20dB. The PCM modulator produces binary output.
Assuming uniform quantization,
i. Find the number of bits required per sample.
ii. Outputs of 30 such PCM coders are time multiplexed.
What would be the minimum required transmission
bandwidth for this multiplexed signal?
3. The information in an analog signal voltage waveform is
to be transmitted over a PCM system with an accuracy
of ± 0.1% (full scale). The analog voltage waveform has
a bandwidth of 100 Hz and an amplitude range of -10
to +10 volts.
i. Find the minimum sampling rate required.
ii. Find the number of bits in each PCM word.
iii. Find minimum bit rate required in the PCM signal.
iv. Find the minimum absolute channel bandwidth required
for the transmission of the PCM signal.
4. Twenty four voice signals are sampled uniformly and
then have to be time division multiplexed. The highest
frequency component for each voice signal is equal to
3.4 kHz. Now,
i. If the signals are pulse amplitude modulated using
Nyquist rate sampling, what would be the minimum
channel bandwidth required.
ii. If the signals are pulse code modulated with an 8 bit
encoder, what would be the sampling rate? The bit rate
of system is given as 1.5 x 106 bits/sec.
5. A signal x(t) is uniformly distributed in the range ±xmax.
Evaluate maximum signal to noise ratio for this signal.

6. Given an audio signal consisting of the sinusoidal term

given as 𝑥 𝑡 = 3 cos(500𝜋𝑡)
i. Determine the signal to quantization noise ratio when this
is quantized using 10 bit PCM.
ii. How many bits of quantization are needed to achieve a
signal to quantization noise ratio atleast 40 dB?
Digital Multiplexers
 Multiplexing is the process of simultaneously transmitting
two or more individual signals over a single
communication channel.
 Multiplexing increases the number of communication
channels so that more information can be transmitted.
 Multiplexer receives a large number of different input
signals and has only one output connected to the single
communication channel.
 At the receiver end, a demultiplexer is used to sort out
the signals into their original form.
 Concept of multiplexing
 Classification of multiplexing techniques
Time Division Multiplexing (TDM)
 In TDM, all the signals are not transmitted simultaneously,
rather transmitted one-by-one.
 Hence, each signal will be transmitted for a very short
interval of time.
 One transmission of each channel completes one cycle
of operation called as a ‘Frame’.
 TDM System
 The data flow of each source (A, B or C) is divided into
units.
 One unit from each source is taken and combined to form
one frame.
 The size of each unit can be 1 bit or several bits.
Digital Telephony: PCM in T1/E1 Carrier
System
 Bell system introduces T1 carrier system in the United
States.
 In T1 system a 24 channels sampled in a sequence.
 A TDM-PCM telephone signals is used to transmit over a
total bandwidth of 1.544 MHz.
 The regenerative repeaters are spaced approximately
6000 feet apart detect the pulses and retransmit new
pulses.
 At the receiver the decoder converts the binary pulses
into samples.
 A segment containing one codeword from each of the
24 channels is called a frame.
 Each frame has 24 x 8 = 192 information bits.
 The sampling rate is 8000 samples/sec, each frame takes
125 μs.
 To separate information bits correctly at the receiver a
framing bit is added at the beginning of each frame.
 This makes a total of 193 bits per frame.
 In addition to information and framing bits, we need to
transmit signaling bits corresponds to dialing pulses, as
well as telephone on-hook/off-hook signals.
 Every sixth frame has 7 x 24 = 168 information bits, 24
signaling bits, and 1 framing bit.
 In all remaining frames, there are 192 information bits
and 1 framing bit.
5
 This technique is called 7 bit encoding, and the
6
signaling channel derived is called robbed-bit signaling.
Multiplexing Hierarchy for Digital
Communication
 The 1.544 Mbps signal of the T1 system, called Digital
Signal level 1 (DS1), is used further to multiplex into higher
level signals DS2, DS3, DS4, and so on.

North American Hierarchy

 Relation between DS and T lines

Rate Number of voice

Service Line
(Mbps) Channels
DS-1 T-1 1.544 24
DS-2 T-2 6.312 96
DS-3 T-3 44.736 672
DS-4 T-4 274.176 4032
 European use a version T lines called E lines.
 The T lines and E lines only differ from the number of
voice channels they carry.

Rate Number of voice

Sr. No. Line
(Mbps) Channels
1. E-1 2.048 30
2. E-2 8.448 120
3. E-3 34.368 480
4. E-4 139.264 1920
Delta Modulation (DM)
 In delta modulation, the incoming message signal is over
sampled.
 DM transmit only one bit per sample.
 DM is a one bit PCM system or a simplified form of
DPCM.
 DM provides a staircase approximation of the original
signal.
 The present sample value is compared with the previous
sample value and this results whether the amplitude is
increased or decreased is transmitted.
 The step size is kept fixed.
 The difference between the input signal and staircase
approximated signal is confined to two levels: +Δ or -Δ.
 When step is reduced, ‘0’ is transmitted and if the step is
increased, ‘1’ is transmitted.
 Transmitter Part

 Here,
𝑥(𝑛𝑇𝑠 ) = Sampled Signal,
𝑥 𝑛𝑇𝑠 = 𝑢[ 𝑛 − 1 𝑇𝑠] = Last sample approx. of the staircase waveform.
𝑒(𝑛𝑇𝑠 ) = 𝑥 𝑛𝑇𝑠 − 𝑥 𝑛𝑇𝑠 = Error at present sample
 Receiver Part
 Advantages of Delta Modulation (DM)
 The delta modulation transmits only one bit for one
sample, therefore the signaling rate and transmission
channel bandwidth is quite small for delta modulation as
compared to PCM.
 The transmitter and receiver implementation is very simple.
There is no analog to digital converter required in delta
modulation.

 Drawbacks of Delta Modulation (DM)

 Slope overload distortion,
 Granular or idle noise.
 To reduce slope overload distortion the step size must be
increased when slope of signal is high.
 To reduce granular noise the step size must be kept
small.
Adaptive Delta Modulation (ADM)
 To overcome the quantization errors due to slope
overload distortion and granular noise, the step size is
made adaptive to variation in the input signal x(t).
 ADM Receiver
Examples

 Given a sine wave of frequency fm and amplitude Am

applied to a delta modulator having step size Δ. Show
that the slope overload distortion will occur if,
Δ
𝐴𝑚 >
2𝜋𝑓𝑚 𝑇𝑠
Here Ts is the sampling period.
 A delta modulator system is designed to operate at five
times the Nyquist rate for a signal having a bandwidth
equal to 3 kHz bandwidth. Calculate the maximum
amplitude of a 2 kHz input sinusoidal signal for which the
delta modulator does not have slope overload. Given
that the quantization step size is 250 mV. Also, derive the
formula that you use.