Pulse-amplitude modulation

Pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM), is a form of signal modulation where the message information is encoded in the amplitude of a series of signal pulses. It is an analog pulse modulation scheme in which the amplitudes of a train of carrier pulses are varied according to the sample value of the message signal.

Generation of PAM
The signal is sampled at regular intervals and each sample is made proportional to the magnitude of the signal at the instant of sampling. These sampled pulses may then be sent either directly by a channel to the receiving end or may be made to modulated using a carrier wave before transmission. For the generation of a PAM signal we use a flat top type PAM scheme because during the transmission,the noise is interfered at top of the transmission pulse which can be easily removed if the PAM pulse in flat top. PAM is also useful for demodulation of PWM These are all come under pulse amplitude modulation..

Types
There are two types of pulse amplitude modulation: 1. Single polarity PAM: In this a suitable fixed DC bias is added to the signal to ensure that all the pulses are positive. 2. Double polarity PAM: In this the pulses are both positive and negative. Pulse-amplitude modulation is widely used in baseband transmission of digital data, with nonbaseband applications having been largely replaced by pulse-code modulation, and, more recently, by pulse-position modulation. In particular, all telephone modems faster than 300 bit/s use quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). (QAM uses a two-dimensional constellation

Pulse-width modulation
Pulse-width modulation (PWM), or pulse-duration modulation (PDM), is a modulation technique that conforms the width of the pulse, formally the pulse duration, based on modulator signal information.

ShannonHartley theorem
Considering all possible multi-level and multi-phase encoding techniques, the ShannonHartley theorem states the channel capacity C, meaning the theoretical tightest upper bound on the information rate (excluding error correcting codes) of clean (or arbitrarily low bit error rate) data that can be sent with a given average signal power S through an analog communication channel subject to additive white Gaussian noise of power N, is:

where

C is the channel capacity in bits per second; B is the bandwidth of the channel in hertz (passband bandwidth in case of a modulated signal); S is the average received signal power over the bandwidth (in case of a modulated signal, often denoted C, i.e. modulated carrier), measured in watts (or volts squared); N is the average noise or interference power over the bandwidth, measured in watts (or volts squared); and S/N is the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) or the carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR) of the communication signal to the Gaussian noise interference expressed as a linear power ratio (not as logarithmic decibels).

Nyquist rate
he number of independent pulses that could be put through a telegraph channel per unit time is limited to twice the bandwidth of the channel. In symbols,

where fp is the pulse frequency (in pulses per second) and B is the bandwidth (in hertz). The quantity 2B later came to be called the Nyquist rate, and transmitting at the limiting pulse rate of 2B pulses per second as signalling at the Nyquist rate