Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)
Pulse-code modulation (PCM) is a modulation technique. It is a digital representation of an analog signal where the magnitude of the signal is sampled regularly at uniform intervals of duration . Every sample is quantized to a series of symbols in a digital code, which is usually a binary code. Shannon's theorem states that frequencies higher than half the sample frequency () cannot be reconstructed. PCM is used in digital telephone systems and for digital audio recording on compact discs.
In telephony, several PCM streams may be multiplexed into a larger aggregate data stream.
Digitization as part of the PCM process
In conventional PCM, before being digitized, the analog signal may be processed (e.g. by amplitude compression), but once digitized, the PCM signal is not subjected to further processing (e.g. digital data compression).
Some forms of PCM combine signal processing with coding. Older versions of these systems applied the processing in the analog domain as part of the A/D process, newer implementations do so in the digital domain. These simple techniques have been largely rendered obsolete by modern transform-based signal compression techniques.
The default encoding on a DS0 is either mu-law PCM (North America) or a-law PCM (Europe and most of the rest of the world). These are logrithmic compression systems where a 12 or 13 bit linear PCM sample number is mapped into an 8 bit value. This system is described by international standard G.711.
- Differential (or Delta) pulse-code modulation encodes the PCM values as differences between the current and the previous value. For audio this type of encoding reduces the number of bits required per sample compared to PCM by about 25%.
- Adaptive DPCM is a variant of DPCM that varies the size of the quantization step, to allow further reduction of the required bandwidth for a given signal-to-noise ratio.
Where circuit costs are high and loss of voice quality is acceptable, it sometimes makes sense to compress the voice signal even further. An ADPCM algorithm is used to map a series of 8 bit PCM samples into a series of 4 bit ADPCM samples. In this way, the capacity of the line is doubled. There is a standard G.726 which describes how this is done.
Later it was found that even further compression was possible and additional standards were published.
Amazingly enough, some of these international standards describe systems and ideas which are covered by privately owned patents and thus to use these standards requires payments to the patent holders.
Some of the ADPCM techniques are used in VOIP (Voice over the Internet) communications.
Encoding the bitstream as a signal
Pulse-code modulation can be either return-to-zero (RZ) or non-return-to-zero (NRZ). For a NRZ system to be synchronized using in-band information, there must not be long sequences of identical symbols, such as ones or zeroes. For binary PCM systems, the density of 1-symbols is called 'ones-density'.
Ones-density is often controlled using precoding techniques where the PCM code is expanded into a slightly longer code with a guaranteed bound on ones-density before modulation into the channel. In other cases, extra 'framing' bits are added into the stream which guarantee at least occasional symbol transitions.
Another technique used to control ones-density is the use of a 'scrambler' polynomial on the raw data which will tend to turn the raw data stream into a stream that looks pseudo-random, but where the raw stream can be recovered exactly by reversing the effect of the polynomial. In this case, long runs of zeroes or ones are still possible on the output, but are considered unlikely enough to be within normal engineering tolerance.
In other cases, the long term DC value of the modulated signal is important, as building up a DC offset will tend to bias detector circuits out of their operating range. In this case special measures are taken to keep a count of the cumulative DC offset, and to modify the codes if necessary to make the DC offset always tend back to zero.
Many of these codes are bipolar codes, where the pulses can be positive, negative or absent. Typically, non-zero pulses alternate between being positive and negative. These rules may be violated to generate special symbols used for framing or other special purposes.
History of PCM
to be written - topics to be covered:
- development of the PCM concept
- Bell Labs and 8 kHz DS0 standard
- early ADPCM codecs
- mu law and A law
- development of hi-fi digital audio
- NICAM
- the compact disk
- sigma-delta analog to digital converter
See also
- channel coding
- error-correcting code
- Manchester code
Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Pulse-code modulation."
| The following table is compiled from various sources, across various languages. When English abbreviations or acronyms come from a non-English source, this is noted. | |||
| Entry | Source | Expression | Field |
| ADPCM | English | Adaptive differential pulse-code modulation | Telecom |
Source: compiled by the editor, based on several corpora (additional references). | |||
Hexadecimal (or equivalents, 770AD-1900s) (references)41 44 41 50 54 49 56 45 44 49 46 46 45 52 45 4E 54 49 41 4C 50 55 4C 53 45 2D 43 4F 44 45 4D 4F 44 55 4C 41 54 49 4F 4E |
| Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519; backwards) (references)
|
Binary Code (1918-1938, probably earlier) (references)01000001 01000100 01000001 01010000 01010100 01001001 01010110 01000101 00100000 01000100 01001001 01000110 01000110 01000101 01010010 01000101 01001110 01010100 01001001 01000001 01001100 00100000 01010000 01010101 01001100 01010011 01000101 00101101 01000011 01001111 01000100 01000101 00100000 01001101 01001111 01000100 01010101 01001100 01000001 01010100 01001001 01001111 01001110 |
HTML Code (1990) (references)A D A P T I V E   D I F F E R E N T I A L   P U L S E - C O D E   M O D U L A T I O N |
ISO 10646 (1991-1993) (references)0041 0044 0041 0050 0054 0049 0056 0045 0044 0049 0046 0046 0045 0052 0045 004E 0054 0049 0041 004C 0050 0055 004C 0053 0045 002D 0043 004F 0044 0045 004D 004F 0044 0055 004C 0041 0054 0049 004F 004E |
Encryption (beginner's substitution cypher): (references)35383550544356392384340403952394854433546250554653391537493839247493855463554434948 |
| 1. Abbreviations 2. Acronyms 3. Orthography 4. Bibliography |
Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
