Digital signal (signal processing)
Signal with discrete values in time and amplitude
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The process of analog-to-digital conversion produces a digital signal. The conversion process can be thought of as occurring in two steps:
- sampling, which produces a continuous-valued discrete-time signal, and
- quantization, which replaces each sample value with an approximation selected from a given discrete set (for example, by truncating or rounding).
An analog signal can be reconstructed after conversion to digital (down to the precision afforded by the quantization used), provided that the signal has negligible power in frequencies above the Nyquist limit and does not saturate the quantizer.
Common practical digital signals are represented as 8-bit (256 levels), 16-bit (65,536 levels), 24-bit (16.8 million levels), and 32-bit (4.3 billion levels) using pulse-code modulation where the number of quantization levels is not necessarily limited to powers of two. A floating point representation is used in many DSP applications.