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Vipin 09U51A0421

SLOPE OVERLOAD DISTORTION

Overloads
Overloads normally system overload when the amplitude of the baseband signal exceeds the range of the active devices used to process the signal. Overload occurs in two ways: 1. Either the modulating signal changes abruptly and the step size is not able to keep place called signal overload. 2. Or the modulating signal is constant over a period of time but quantized steps are transient and change, leading to step overload.

Noise in Delta Modulation Delta modulation systems are subject to two types of quantization error: 1. Slope Overload Distortions 2. Granular Noise

Slope Overload Distortions

In delta modulation, the rate of rise and fall of input signal is very high at some time instants. This rapid change of input signal cannot be achieved by staircase signal generated by the predictor. The step size is too small for the predictor to follow the rapid changes in input signal. Hence there is large difference between the actual signal and predicted signal. This difference introduces the distortion. It is called slope overload distortion.

Slope overload distortion arises because of large dynamic range of the input signal or in other words under maximum slope of the signal, step size becomes small to follow the step of the input waveform. This condition is called slope overload and the resulting quantization error is called slope overload distortion. The next figure shows the slope overload distortion

Slope overload is not a limitation of just a DM system, but an inherent problem with any system, such as DPCM in general, that encodes the difference in a signal from one sample to the next. A difference system encodes the slope of the input with a finite number of bits and hence a finite range. If the slope exceeds that range, slope overload occurs.

Slope overload distortion will take place if slope of sine wave is greater than slope of delta modulator i.e

Reduction of Slope Overload

The step size is reasonable for those sections of the sampled waveform of small slope, but the approximation is poor elsewhere. This is slope overload, due to too small a step.
Slope overload is illustrated in Figure 3.

To reduce the possibility of slope overload the step size can be increased [for the same sampling rate]. This is illustrated in figure 4 below. The sawtooth is better able to match the message in the regions of steep slope.

An alternative method of slope overload reduction is to increase the sampling rate. This is illustrated in figure 5 below, where the rate has been increased by a factor of 2.4 times, but the step is the same size as in Figure 3.

To prevent slope overload distortion

Where delta is the fixed step size and T=1/f is the sampling interval. Therefore with a fixed sampling frequency, the step size has to be large in order to avoid slope overload. The slope overload distortion can be minimized by increasing the step size. But increase in step size increases granular noise. To solve this problem the delta modulation process is modified and known as adaptive delta modulation. The problem of slope overloading in delta modulation systems can be alleviated by filtering the signal to limit the maximum rate of change or by increasing the step size and/or the sampling rate. Filtering the signal and increasing the step size will result in poor signal resolution, and increasing the sampling rate will lead to larger bandwidth requirements. A better way to avoid slope overload is to detect the overload condition and make the step size larger when overloading is detected.