dspLog turns two! Happy Birthday!
As on 21st October 2007, we moved from blogspot domain at to the self hosted domain at https://dsplog.com. Over the last two years, the blog has grown quite a bit, and am reasonably happy with the progress. Let us look back at the positives and negatives over the last year.
ADC SNR with clock jitter and quantization noise
My friend and colleague Mr. Vineet Srivastava pointed me to a nice article on clock jitter – Clock Jitter Effects on Sampling : A tutorial – by Carlos Azeredo-Leme, IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine, Third Quarter 2011. In this post, let us discuss the total Signal to Noise Ratio at the output of an analog to…
GATE-2012 ECE Q28 (electromagnetics)
Question 28 on electromagnetics from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q28. A transmission line with a characteristic impedance of 100 is used to match a 50 section to a 200 section. If the matching is to be done both at 429MHz and 1GHz, the length of the transmission line can be approximately (A) 82.5cm…
GATE-2012 ECE Q46 (math)
Question 46 on math from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q46. The maximum value of in the interval [1, 6] is (A) 21 (B) 25 (C) 41 (D) 46 Solution Let us start by finding the critical points of the function . The first derivative is, . Solving by…
MSK transmitter and receiver
In a post on Minimum Shift Keying (MSK), we had discussed that MSK uses two frequencies which are separated by and phase discontinuity is avoided in symbol boundaries. In that post, we had discussed MSK as a continuous phase transmit signal and showed that phase changes through 0, 90, 180 and 270 degrees. In this…
Weighted Least Squares and locally weighted linear regression
From the post on Closed Form Solution for Linear regression, we computed the parameter vector which minimizes the square of the error between the predicted value and the actual output for all values in the training set. In that model all the values in the training set is given equal importance. Let us consider the case where it is known…
Noise Figure of cascaded stages
Following the discussion on thermal noise and it’s modeling and noise figure computation for a simple resistor network, in this article let us discuss the Noise Figure of cascaded stages.
Gray code to Binary conversion for PSK and PAM
Given that we have discussed Binary to Gray code conversion, let us discuss the Gray to BInary conversion. Conversion from Gray code to natural Binary Let be the equivalent Gray code for an bit binary number with representing the index of the bit. 1. For , i.e, the most significant bit (MSB) of the Gray…
Support Vibha’s Dream Mile event
My friend Mr. Balaji volunteers for Vibha, a non-profit organization whose mission is to ensure that every underprivileged child attains his or her right to education, health and opportunity. Vibha, which was founded in 1991 has a volunteer network of 825 members spread across Atlanta, Austin, Bay Area, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Jacksonville, Los Angeles,…
Oscillator phase noise
Oscillators are used in typical radio circuits to drive the mixer used for the up-conversion or down-conversion of the passband transmission. Ideally, the spectrum of the oscillator is expected to have an impulse at the frequency of oscillation with no frequency components else where. However the spectrum of practical oscillators do have spectrum skirts around…
GATE-2012 ECE Q52 (electromagnetics)
Question 52 on electromagnetics from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. An infinitely long uniform solid wire of radius carries a uniform dc current of density . Q52. The magnetic field at a distance from the center of the wire is proportional to (A) for and for (B) for and for (C) for and for (D) for and for Solution…
Gradients for Binary Classification with Sigmoid
In a classification problem, the output (also called the label or class) takes a small number of discrete values rather than continuous values. For a simple binary classification problem, where output takes only two discrete values : 0 or 1, the sigmoid function can be used to transform the output of a linear regression model…
MIMO with ZF SIC and optimal ordering
In previous posts, we had discussed equalization of a 2×2 MIMO channel with Zero Forcing (ZF) equalization and later, Zero Forcing equalization with successive interference cancellation (ZF-SIC). In this post, we will explore a variant of ZF-SIC called Zero Forcing Successive Interference Cancellation with optimal ordering. We will assume that the channel is a flat…