Pulse-density Modulation - Analog-to-digital Conversion

Analog-to-digital Conversion

A PDM bitstream is encoded from an analog signal through the process of delta-sigma modulation. This process uses a one bit quantizer that produces either a 1 or 0 depending on the amplitude of the analog signal. A 1 or 0 corresponds to a signal that is all the way up or all the way down, respectively. Because in the real world analog signals are rarely all the way in one direction there is a quantization error, the difference between the 1 or 0 and the actual amplitude it represents. This error is fed back negatively in the ΔΣ process loop. In this way every error successively influences every other quantization measurement and its error. This has the effect of averaging out the quantization error.