Fundamentals of Electrical

Engineering I
© Don Johnson

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Contents
Chapter 1 Introduction ..................................................................................................1
1.1 Themes ................................................................................................................................1
1.2 Signals Represent Information ........................................................................................2
1.2.1 Analog Signals..........................................................................................................3
1.2.2 Digital Signals...........................................................................................................4
1.3 Structure of Communication Systems .............................................................................5
1.4 The Fundamental Signal ...................................................................................................7
1.4.1 The Sinusoid ............................................................................................................7
Exercise 1.4.1 ............................................................................................................8
Exercise 1.4.2 ............................................................................................................8
1.4.2 Communicating Information with Signals ............................................................8
1.5 Introduction Problems.......................................................................................................9
1.6 Solutions to Exercises in Chapter 1 ................................................................................10
Chapter 2 Signals and Systems ...................................................................................11
2.1 Complex Numbers ...........................................................................................................11
2.1.1 DeXnitions ..............................................................................................................11
Exercise 2.1.1 ..........................................................................................................13
Exercise 2.1.2 ..........................................................................................................13
2.1.2 Euler's Formula ......................................................................................................13
2.1.3 Calculating with Complex Numbers....................................................................14
Exercise 2.1.3 .....................................................................................................15
Example 2.1 ............................................................................................................16

2.2 Elemental Signals..............................................................................................................16

2.2.1 Sinusoids ................................................................................................................16
2.2.2 Complex Exponentials ..........................................................................................17
2.2.3 Real Exponentials ..................................................................................................18
2.2.4 Unit Step .................................................................................................................18
2.2.5 Pulse........................................................................................................................20
2.2.6 Square Wave ..........................................................................................................20
2.2.7 Signal Decomposition ...........................................................................................21
Example 2.2 ............................................................................................................21
Exercise 2.3.1 ..........................................................................................................21
2.3 Discrete-Time Signals ......................................................................................................21
2.3.1 Real-and Complex-valued Signals .......................................................................22
2.3.2 Complex Exponentials ..........................................................................................22
2.3.3 Sinusoids ................................................................................................................23
2.3.4 Unit Sample............................................................................................................23
2.3.5 Symbolic-valued Signals .......................................................................................24
2.3.6 Introduction to Systems .......................................................................................24
[Link] Cascade Interconnection...........................................................................25
2.3.7 Parallel Interconnection .......................................................................................25
2.3.8 Feedback Interconnection....................................................................................26
2.4 Simple Systems ................................................................................................................27
 2.4.1 Sources ...................................................................................................................27
2.4.2 AmpliXers ...............................................................................................................27
2.4.3 Delay .......................................................................................................................28
2.4.4 Time Reversal.........................................................................................................28
Exercise 2.6.1 ..........................................................................................................28
2.4.5 Derivative Systems and Integrators ...................................................................29
2.4.6 Linear Systems.......................................................................................................29
2.4.7 Time-Invariant Systems ........................................................................................30
2.5 Signals and Systems Problems .......................................................................................32
Problem 2.1: Complex Number Arithmetic ................................................................32
Problem 2.2: Discovering Roots ...................................................................................32
Problem 2.3: Cool Exponentials ...................................................................................32
Problem 2.4: Complex-valued Signals .........................................................................33
Problem 2.5: ...................................................................................................................34
Problem 2.6: ...................................................................................................................35
Problem 2.7: Linear, Time-Invariant Systems .............................................................36
Problem 2.8: Linear Systems ........................................................................................37
Problem 2.9: Communication Channel .......................................................................37
Problem 2.10: Analog Computers ................................................................................38
2.6 Solutions to Exercises in Chapter 2 ................................................................................38
Chapter 3 Analog Signal Processing ...........................................................................40
3.1 Voltage, Current, and Generic Circuit Elements ...........................................................40
Exercise 3.1.1 ..................................................................................................................41
3.2 Ideal Circuit Elements .....................................................................................................41
3.2.1 Resistor ...................................................................................................................42
3.2.2 Capacitor ................................................................................................................42
3.2.3 Inductor ..................................................................................................................43
3.2.4 Sources ...................................................................................................................44
3.3 Ideal and Real-World Circuit Elements ..........................................................................44
3.4 Electric Circuits and Interconnection Laws....................................................................45
3.4.1 Kirchhof's Current Law .........................................................................................46
Exercise 3.4.1 ..........................................................................................................47
3.4.2 Kirchhof's Voltage Law (KVL) ................................................................................47
Exercise 3.4.2 ..........................................................................................................48

3.5 Power Dissipation in Resistor Circuits ...........................................................................48

Exercise 3.5.1 ..................................................................................................................50
Exercise 3.5.2 ..................................................................................................................50
3.6 Series and Parallel Circuits ..............................................................................................50
Exercise 3.6.1 ..................................................................................................................52
Exercise 3.6.2 ..................................................................................................................54
Example 3.1 ....................................................................................................................55
Exercise 3.6.3 ..................................................................................................................56
3.7 Equivalent Circuits: Resistors and Sources....................................................................57
Exercise 3.7.1 ..................................................................................................................59
Example 3.2 ....................................................................................................................59
Exercise 3.7.2 ..................................................................................................................61
3.8 Circuits with Capacitors and Inductors ..........................................................................62
3.9 The Impedance Concept..................................................................................................63
3.10 Time and Frequency Domains ......................................................................................65
Example 3.3 ....................................................................................................................67
Exercise 3.10.1 ................................................................................................................68
3.11 Power in the Frequency Domain ..................................................................................68
Exercise 3.11.1 ................................................................................................................69
Exercise 3.11.2 ................................................................................................................70
3.12 Equivalent Circuits: Impedances and Sources ............................................................70
Example 3.4 ....................................................................................................................72
3.13 Transfer Functions .........................................................................................................73
Exercise 3.13.1 ................................................................................................................76
3.14 Designing Transfer Functions .......................................................................................76
Example 3.5 ....................................................................................................................77
3.15 Formal Circuit Methods: Node Method .......................................................................79
Example 3.6: Node Method Example ..........................................................................82
Exercise 3.15.1 ................................................................................................................83
Exercise 3.15.2 ................................................................................................................84
3.16 Power Conservation in Circuits.....................................................................................84
3.17 Electronics ......................................................................................................................86
3.18 Dependent Sources........................................................................................................86
3.19 Operational AmpliXers...................................................................................................89
3.20 Inverting AmpliXer..........................................................................................................90
3.21 Active Filters ....................................................................................................................91
Example 3.7 ....................................................................................................................92
Exercise 3.19.1 ................................................................................................................93
3.22 Intuitive Way of Solving Op-Amp Circuits ....................................................................93
Example 3.8 ....................................................................................................................95
3.23 The Diode ........................................................................................................................96
3.24 Analog Signal Processing Problems .............................................................................98
Problem 3.1: Simple Circuit Analysis ...........................................................................98
Problem 3.2: Solving Simple Circuits ...........................................................................99
Problem 3.3: Equivalent Resistance ............................................................................99
Problem 3.4: Superposition Principle ....................................................................... 100
Problem 3.5: Current and Voltage Divider ............................................................... 101
Problem 3.6: Thevenin and Mayer-Norton Equivalents ......................................... 101
Problem 3.7: Detective Work ..................................................................................... 102
Problem 3.8: Bridge Circuits ...................................................................................... 102
Problem 3.9: Cartesian to Polar Conversion ........................................................... 103
Problem 3.10: The Complex Plane ............................................................................ 103
Problem 3.11: Cool Curves ........................................................................................ 103
Problem 3.12: Trigonometric Identities and Complex Exponentials .................... 104
Figure 3.61Problem 3.13: Transfer Functions ......................................................... 104
Problem 3.14: Using Impedances ............................................................................. 105
Problem 3.15: Measurement Chaos ......................................................................... 105
Problem 3.16: Transfer Functions ............................................................................ 106
 Problem 3.17: A Simple Circuit .................................................................................. 106
Problem 3.18: Circuit Design ..................................................................................... 107
Problem 3.19: Equivalent Circuits and Power ......................................................... 107
Problem 3.20: Power Transmission .......................................................................... 108
Problem 3.21: Optimal Power Transmission ........................................................... 109
Problem 3.22: Big is Beautiful ................................................................................... 110
Problem 3.23: Sharing a Channel ............................................................................. 110
Problem 3.24: Circuit Detective Work ...................................................................... 111
Problem 3.25: Mystery Circuit ................................................................................... 111
Problem 3.26: More Circuit Detective Work ............................................................ 112
Problem 3.27: Linear, Time-Invariant Systems ....................................................... 113
Problem 3.28: Long and Sleepless Nights ............................................................... 114
Problem 3.29: A Testing Circuit ................................................................................. 114
Problem 3.30: Black-Box Circuit ................................................................................ 115
Problem 3.31: Solving a Mystery Circuit .................................................................. 115
Problem 3.32: Find the Load Impedance ................................................................. 116
Problem 3.33: Analog "Hum" Rejection ................................................................... 116
Problem3.34: An Interesting Circuit ......................................................................... 117
Problem 3.35: A Simple Circuit .................................................................................. 117
Problem 3.36: An Interesting and Useful Circuit ..................................................... 118
Problem 3.37: A Circuit Problem ............................................................................... 119
Problem 3.38: Analog Computers ............................................................................. 119
Problem 3.39: Transfer Functions and Circuits ....................................................... 120
Problem 3.40: Fun in the Lab .................................................................................... 120
Problem 3.41: Dependent Sources ........................................................................... 120
Problem 3.42: Operational Amplifers ....................................................................... 121
Problem 3.43: Op-Amp Circuit .................................................................................. 122
Problem 3.44: Why Op-Amps are Useful ................................................................. 123
Problem 3.45: Operational AmpliXers ...................................................................... 124
Problem 3.46: Designing a Bandpass Filter ............................................................. 124
Problem 3.47: Pre-emphasis or De-emphasis? ....................................................... 125
Problem 3.48: Active Filter ......................................................................................... 126
Problem 3.49: This is a Xlter? ..................................................................................... 126
Problem 3.50: Optical Receivers ............................................................................... 127
Problem 3.51: Reverse Engineering .......................................................................... 128
3.25 Solutions to Exercises in Chapter 3........................................................................... 128
Chapter 4 Frequency Domain ...................................................................................132
4.1 Introduction to the Frequency Domain ..................................................................... 132
4.2 Complex Fourier Series................................................................................................. 132
Exercise 4.2.1 ............................................................................................................... 133
Example 4.1 ................................................................................................................. 134
Exercise 4.2.2 ............................................................................................................... 137
4.3 Classic Fourier Series .................................................................................................... 138
Exercise 4.3.1 ............................................................................................................... 138
Exercise 4.3.2 ............................................................................................................... 140
Exercise 4.3.3 ............................................................................................................... 140
Example 4.2 ................................................................................................................. 141
4.4 A Signal's Spectrum ....................................................................................................... 142
Exercise 4.4.1 ............................................................................................................... 143
Exercise 4.4.2 ............................................................................................................... 144
4.5 Fourier Series Approximation of Signals .................................................................... 144
Exercise 4.5.1 ............................................................................................................... 148
4.6 Encoding Information in the Frequency Domain ...................................................... 149
Exercise 4.6.1 ............................................................................................................... 150
Exercise 4.6.2 ............................................................................................................... 151
4.7 Filtering Periodic Signals............................................................................................... 152
Example 4.3 ................................................................................................................. 153
Exercise 4.7.1 ............................................................................................................... 154
4.8 Derivation of the Fourier Transform ........................................................................... 154
Example 4.4 ................................................................................................................. 155
Exercise 4.8.1 ............................................................................................................... 156
Exercise 4.8.2 ............................................................................................................... 157
Example 4.5 ................................................................................................................. 159
Exercise 4.8.3 ............................................................................................................... 161
Exercise 4.8.4 ............................................................................................................... 161
4.9 Linear Time Invariant Systems..................................................................................... 161
Example 4.6 ................................................................................................................. 162
Exercise 4.9.1 ............................................................................................................... 163
4.9.1 Transfer Functions ............................................................................................. 164
4.9.2 Commutative Transfer Functions .................................................................... 164
4.10 Modeling the Speech Signal ....................................................................................... 165
Exercise 4.10.1 ............................................................................................................. 167
Exercise 4.10.2 ............................................................................................................. 169
Exercise 4.10.3 ............................................................................................................. 170
4.11 Frequency Domain Problems .................................................................................... 173
Problem 4.1: Simple Fourier Series .......................................................................... 173
Problem 4.2: Fourier Series ....................................................................................... 174
Problem 4.3: Phase Distortion .................................................................................. 175
Problem 4.4: Approximating Periodic Signals ......................................................... 176
Problem 4.5: Long, Hot Days ..................................................................................... 177
Problem 4.6: Fourier Transform Pairs ...................................................................... 178
Problem 4.7: Duality in Fourier Transforms ............................................................ 178
Problem 4.8: Spectra of Pulse Sequences ............................................................... 179
Problem 4.10: Lowpass Filtering a Square Wave .................................................... 180
Problem 4.11: Mathematics with Circuits ................................................................ 180
Problem 4.12: Where is that sound coming from? ................................................. 181
Problem 4.13: Arrangements of Systems ................................................................ 182
Problem 4.14: Filtering ............................................................................................... 182
Problem 4.15: Circuits Filter! ..................................................................................... 183
Problem 4.16: Reverberation .................................................................................... 183
Problem 4.17: Echoes in Telephone Systems .......................................................... 183
Problem 4.18: Eiective Drug Delivery ...................................................................... 184
Problem 4.19: Catching Speeders with Radar ......................................................... 184
 Problem 4.20: Demodulating an AM Signal ............................................................. 185
Problem 4.21: Unusual Amplitude Modulation ...................................................... 186
Problem 4.22: Sammy Falls Asleep... ........................................................................ 187
Problem 4.23: Jamming .............................................................................................. 188
Problem 4.24: AM Stereo ........................................................................................... 189
Problem 4.25: Novel AM Stereo Method ................................................................. 190
Problem 4.26: A Radical Radio Idea .......................................................................... 191
Problem 4.27: Secret Communication ..................................................................... 191
Problem 4.28: Signal Scrambling .............................................................................. 192
4.12 Solutions to Exercises in Chapter 4........................................................................... 192
Chapter 5 Digital Signal Processing .........................................................................196
5.1 Introduction to Digital Signal Processing.................................................................... 196
5.2 Introduction to Computer Organization .................................................................... 197
5.2.1 Computer Architecture ...................................................................................... 197
5.2.2 Representing Numbers ..................................................................................... 198
Exercise 5.2.1 ....................................................................................................... 199
Exercise 5.2.2 ....................................................................................................... 200
5.2.3 Computer Arithmetic and Logic ....................................................................... 200
Exercise 5.2.3 ....................................................................................................... 201
5.3 The Sampling Theorem ................................................................................................ 201
5.3.1 Analog-to-Digital Conversion ........................................................................... 201
5.4 The Sampling Theorem................................................................................................. 202
Exercise 5.3.1 ............................................................................................................... 204
Exercise 5.3.2 ............................................................................................................... 204
Exercise 5.3.3 ............................................................................................................... 205
5.5 Amplitude Quantization................................................................................................ 205
Exercise 5.4.1 ............................................................................................................... 206
Exercise 5.4.2 ............................................................................................................... 208
Exercise 5.4.3 ............................................................................................................... 208
Exercise 5.4.4 ............................................................................................................... 208
5.6 Discrete-Time Signals and Systems ............................................................................ 208
5.6.1 Real-and Complex-valued Signals .................................................................... 209
5.6.2 Complex Exponentials ....................................................................................... 209
5.6.3 Sinusoids ............................................................................................................ 209
5.6.4 Unit Sample......................................................................................................... 210
5.6.5 Unit Step ............................................................................................................. 210
5.6.6 Symbolic Signals ................................................................................................ 211
5.6.7 Discrete-Time Systems ..................................................................................... 211
5.7 Discrete-Time Fourier Transform (DTFT) .................................................................... 211
5.8 Discrete Fourier Transforms (DFT) .............................................................................. 217
5.9 DFT: Computational Complexity .................................................................................. 220
5.10 Fast Fourier Transform (FFT)...................................................................................... 221
5.11 Spectrograms............................................................................................................... 224
5.12 Discrete-Time Systems ............................................................................................... 228
5.13 Discrete-Time Systems in the Time-Domain ............................................................ 228
5.14 Discrete-Time Systems in the Frequency Domain .................................................. 233
 5.14.1 Filtering in the Frequency Domain................................................................. 235
5.15 Elciency of Frequency-Domain Filtering................................................................. 239
5.16 Discrete-Time Filtering of Analog Signals ................................................................. 242
5.17 Digital Signal Processing Problems ........................................................................... 244
5.18 Solutions to Exercises in Chapter 5........................................................................... 256
Chapter 6 Information Communication ..................................................................261
6.1 Information Communication ....................................................................................... 261
6.2 Types of Communication Channels ............................................................................ 262
6.3 Wireline Channels.......................................................................................................... 263
6.4 Wireless Channels ......................................................................................................... 269
6.5 Line-of-Sight Transmission ........................................................................................... 270
6.6 The Ionosphere and Communications ....................................................................... 272
6.7 Communication with Satellites .................................................................................... 272
6.8 Noise and Interference ................................................................................................. 273
6.9 Channel Models ............................................................................................................. 274
6.10 Baseband Communication......................................................................................... 276
6.11 Modulated Communication ....................................................................................... 277
6.12 Signal-to-Noise Ratio of an Amplitude-Modulated Signal ...................................... 278
6.13 Digital Communication ............................................................................................... 281
6.14 Binary Phase Shift Keying ........................................................................................... 282
6.15 Frequency Shift Keying ............................................................................................... 285
6.16 Digital Communication Receivers.............................................................................. 287
6.17 Digital Communication in the Presence of Noise.................................................... 289
6.18 Digital Communication System Properties .............................................................. 291
6.19 Digital Channels........................................................................................................... 292
6.20 Entropy ......................................................................................................................... 293
6.21 Source Coding Theorem ............................................................................................. 295
6.22 Compression and the Huiman Code ....................................................................... 297
6.23 Subtlies of Coding........................................................................................................ 299
6.24 Channel Coding ........................................................................................................... 302
6.25 Repetition Codes ......................................................................................................... 302
6.26 Block Channel Coding ................................................................................................. 304
6.27 Error-Correcting Codes: Hamming Distance............................................................ 305
6.28 Error-Correcting Codes: Channel Decoding ............................................................. 308
6.29 Error-Correcting Codes: Hamming Codes ................................................................ 310
6.30 Noisy Channel Coding Theorem ............................................................................... 313
6.30.1 Noisy Channel Coding Theorem .................................................................... 313
6.30.2 Converse to the Noisy Channel Coding Theorem ........................................ 314
6.31 Capacity of a Channel ................................................................................................. 315
6.32 Comparison of Analog and Digital Communication................................................ 316
6.33 Communication Networks ......................................................................................... 317
6.34 Message Routing ......................................................................................................... 319
6.35 Network architectures and interconnection ............................................................ 320
6.36 Ethernet ........................................................................................................................ 321
6.37 Communication Protocols.......................................................................................... 324
6.38 Information Communication Problems.................................................................... 325
6.39 Solutions to Exercises in Chapter 6........................................................................... 342
Chapter 7 Appendix ...................................................................................................351
7.1 Decibels .......................................................................................................................... 351
7.2 Permutations and Combinations ............................................................................... 352
7.2.1 Permutations and Combinations ..................................................................... 352
7.3 Frequency Allocations .................................................................................................. 354
7.4 Solutions to Exercises in Chapter 7 ............................................................................ 354
 1

Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Themes
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From its beginnings in the late nineteenth century, electrical engineering has
blossomed from focusing on electrical circuits for power, telegraphy and telephony to
focusing on a much broader range of disciplines. However, the underlying themes are
relevant today: Power creation and transmission and information have been the
underlying themes of electrical engineering for a century and a half. This course
concentrates on the latter theme: the representation, manipulation, transmission,
and reception of information by electrical means. This course describes what
information is, how engineers quantify information, and how electrical signals
represent information.

Information can take a variety of forms. When you speak to a friend, your thoughts
are translated by your brain into motor commands that cause various vocal tract
components the jaw, the tongue, the lips to move in a coordinated fashion.
Information arises in your thoughts and is represented by speech, which must have a
well deXned, broadly known structure so that someone else can understand what you
say. Utterances convey information in sound pressure waves, which propagate to your
friend's ear. There, sound energy is converted back to neural activity, and, if what you
say makes sense, she understands what you say. Your words could have been
recorded on a compact disc (CD), mailed to your friend and listened to by her on her
stereo. Information can take the form of a text Xle you type into your word processor.
You might send the Xle via e-mail to a friend, who reads it and understands it. From an
information theoretic viewpoint, all of these scenarios are equivalent, although the
forms of the information representation sound waves, plastic and computer Xles are
very diierent.

Engineers, who don't care about information content, categorize information into two
diierent forms: analog and digital. Analog information is continuous valued;
examples are audio and video. Digital information is discrete valued; examples are
text (like what you are reading now) and DNA sequences.

The conversion of information-bearing signals from one energy form into another is
known as energyconversion or transduction. All conversion systems are inelcient
since some input energy is lost as heat, but this loss does not necessarily mean that
the conveyed information is lost. Conceptually we could use any form of energy to
represent information, but electric signals are uniquely well-suited for information
representation, transmission (signals can be broadcast from antennas or sent through
wires), and manipulation (circuits can be built to reduce noise and computers can be
used to modify information). Thus, we will be concerned with how to

• represent all forms of information with electrical signals,

• encode information as voltages, currents, and electromagnetic waves,
2

• manipulate information-bearing electric signals with circuits and computers, and

• receive electric signals and convert the information expressed by electric signals
back into a useful form.

Telegraphy represents the earliest electrical information system, and it dates from
1837. At that time, electrical science was largely empirical, and only those with
experience and intuition could develop telegraph systems. Electrical science came of
age when James Clerk Maxwell2 proclaimed in 1864 a set of equations that he claimed
governed all electrical phenomena. These equations predicted that light was an
electromagnetic wave, and that energy could propagate. Because of the complexity of
Maxwell's presentation, the development of the telephone in 1876 was due largely to
empirical work. Once Heinrich Hertz conXrmed Maxwell's prediction of what we now
call radio waves in about 1882, Maxwell's equations were simpliXed by Oliver
Heaviside and others, and were widely read. This understanding of fundamentals led
to a quick succession of inventions the wireless telegraph (1899), the vacuum tube
(1905), and radio broadcasting that marked the true emergence of the
communications age.

During the Xrst part of the twentieth century, circuit theory and electromagnetic
theory were all an electrical engineer needed to know to be qualiXed and produce
Xrst-rate designs. Consequently, circuit theory served as the foundation and the
framework of all of electrical engineering education. At mid-century, three
"inventions" changed the ground rules. These were the Xrst public demonstration of
the Xrst electronic computer (1946), the invention of the transistor (1947), and the
publication of A Mathematical Theoryof Communication by Claude Shannon (1948).
Although conceived separately, these creations gave birth to the information age, in
which digital and analog communication systems interact and compete for design
preferences. About twenty years later, the laser was invented, which opened even
more design possibilities. Thus, the primary focus shifted from how to build
communication systems (the circuit theory era) to what communications systems
were intended to accomplish. Only once the intended system is speciXed can an
implementation be selected. Today's electrical engineer must be mindful of the
system's ultimate goal, and understand the tradeois between digital and analog
alternatives, and between hardware and software conXgurations in designing
information systems.

Note: Thanks to the translation efforts of Rice University's Disability Support

Services , this collection is now available in a Braille-printable version. Please
click here5 to download a .zip file containing all the necessary .dxb and image
files.

1.2 Signals Represent Information

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Whether analog or digital, information is represented by the fundamental quantity in

electrical engineering: the signal. Stated in mathematical terms, a signal is merely a
function. Analog signals are continuous-valued; digital signals are discrete-valued.
 3

The independent variable of the signal could be time (speech, for example), space
(images), or the integers (denoting the sequencing of letters and numbers in the
football score).

1.2.1 Analog Signals

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Analog signals are usually signals deNned over continuous independent

variable(s). Modeling the Speech Signal (Page 165) is produced by your vocal cords
exciting acoustic resonances in your vocal tract. The result is pressure waves
propagating in the air, and the speech signal thus corresponds to a function having
independent variables of space and time and a value corresponding to air pressure: s
(x, t) (Here we use vector notation x to denote spatial coordinates). When you record
someone talking, you are evaluating the speech signal at a particular spatial location,
x0 say. An example of the resulting waveform s (x0,t) is shown in this Figure 1.1.

Speech Example

Figure 1.1 Speech Example A speech signal's amplitude relates to tiny air pressure variations. Shown is a
recording of the vowel "e" (as in "speech").

Photographs are static, and are continuous-valued signals deXned over space. Black-
and-white images have only one value at each point in space, which amounts to its
optical refection properties. In Figure 1.2, an image is shown, demonstrating that it
(and all other images as well) are functions of two independent spatial variables.
4

Figure 1.2 Lena On the left is the classic Lena image, which is used ubiquitously as a test image. It contains
straight and curved lines, complicated texture, and a face. On the right is a perspective display of the Lena
image as a signal: a function of two spatial variables. The colors merely help show what signal values are
about the same size. In this image, signal values range between 0 and 255; why is that?

Color images have values that express how reFectivity depends on the optical
spectrum. Painters long ago found that mixing together combinations of the so-called
primary colors red, yellow and blue can produce very realistic color images. Thus,
images today are usually thought of as having three values at every point in space, but
a diierent set of colors is used: How much of red, green and blue is present.
Mathematically, color pictures are multivalued vector-valued signals: s (x)=(r (x) ,g (x) ,b
T
(x)) .

Interesting cases abound where the analog signal depends not on a continuous
variable, such as time, but on a discrete variable. For example, temperature readings
taken every hour have continuous analog values, but the signal's independent variable
is (essentially) the integers.

1.2.2 Digital Signals

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The word "digital" means discrete-valued and implies the signal has an integer-valued
independent variable. Digital information includes numbers and symbols (characters
typed on the keyboard, for example). Computers rely on the digital representation of
information to manipulate and transform information. Symbols do not have a
numeric value, and each is represented by a unique number. The ASCII character code
has the upper-and lowercase characters, the numbers, punctuation marks, and
various other symbols represented by a seven-bit integer. For example, the ASCII code
represents the letter a as the number 97 and the letter A as 65. Figure 1.3 shows the
international convention on associating characters with integers.
 5

Figure 1.3 ASCII Table The ASCII translation table shows how standard keyboard characters are
represented by integers. In pairs of columns, this table displays Xrst the so-called 7-bit code (how many
characters in a seven-bit code?), then the character the number represents. The numeric codes are
represented in hexadecimal (base-16) notation. Mnemonic characters correspond to control characters,
some of which may be familiar (like cr for carriage return) and some not (bel means a "bell").

1.3 Structure of Communication Systems

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Figure 1.4 The Fundamental Model of Communication.

Figure 1.5 DeNnition of a system A system operates on its input signal x (t) to produce an output y (t).

The fundamental model of communications is portrayed in Figure 1.4. In this

fundamental model, each message-bearing signal, exempliXed by s (t), is analog and is
a function of time. A system operates on zero, one, or several signals to produce
more signals or to simply absorb them Figure 1.5. In electrical engineering, we
represent a system as a box, receiving input signals (usually coming from the left) and
producing from them new output signals. This graphical representation is known as a
block diagram. We denote input signals by lines having arrows pointing into the box,
output signals by arrows pointing away. As typiXed by the communications model,