Pulse-Amplitude Modulation

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Pulse-amplitude modulation, acronym PAM, is a form of signal modulation where the message information is encoded in the amplitude of a series of signal pulses. Example: A two bit modulator (PAM-4) will take two bits at a time and will map the signal amplitude to one of four possible levels, for example −3 volts, −1 volt, 1 volt, and 3 volts. Demodulation is performed by detecting the amplitude level of the carrier at every symbol period. Pulse-amplitude modulation is widely used in baseband transmission of digital data, with non-baseband applications having been largely superseded by pulse-code modulation, and, more recently, by pulse-position modulation. In particular, all telephone modems faster than 300 bit/s use quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). (QAM uses a two-dimensional constellation).