Spectrum analysis of digital UPWM signals generated from random modulating signals

Abstract

This work studies the spectrum of discrete-time Uniform-sampling pulse width modulation (UPWM) signals originating from stochastic input signals. It demonstrates that for ergodic input sequences of independent and identically distributed random variables, the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) of the UPWM signals can be directly estimated from the input signal’s statistics. Consequently, it is shown that if the input signal can be modeled as such a random sequence, only statistical information of the sequence is required for the accurate estimation of the DFT of the UPWM signal. This is achieved here by proving that the DFT estimators obtained by observation of the input sequence within a time window are consistent estimators of the DFT coefficients of the underlying random process. Moreover, for signals whose generalized probability density functions can be expressed as functions of a small number of parameters, the DFT coefficients can be estimated or even calculated via closed-form expressions with linear complexity. Examples are given for input signals derived from symmetric and asymmetric distributions. The results are validated by comparison with evaluations of the UPWM signal’s DFT via the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). The proposed method provides a mathematical framework for the analysis and design of UPWM systems whose inputs have known statistical properties.