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Analog-to-Digital Conversion

20 March, 2015 - 16:18

Because of the way computers are organized, signal must be represented by a fnite number of bytes. This restriction means that both the time axis and the amplitude axis must be quantized: They must each be a multiple of the integers. l2 Quite surprisingly, the Sampling Theorem allows us to quantize the time axis without error for some signals. The signals that can be sampled without introducing error are interesting, and as described in the next section, we can make a signal "samplable" by filtering. In contrast, no one has found a way of performing the amplitude quantization step without introducing an unrecoverable error. Thus, a signal's value can no longer be any real number. Signals processed by digital computers must be discrete-valued: their values must be proportional to the integers. Consequently, analog-to-digital conversion introduces error.