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University of Washington Electrical Engineering & Agilent Technologies RF Laboratory

The Decibel (dB) Unit


Historically, the decibel unit was developed to address the need to conveniently describe how well a
communications signal would propagate through a network. Its predecessors were the units of Miles of
Standard Cable (MSC) and Transmission Units (TU), both of which have now become lost to antiquity.
Researchers at Bell Telephone Laboratories conceived of the utility of a unit which naturally contained a
logarithmic scale and which allowed it to therefore handle a wide dynamic range of signal amplitudes.
These researchers named this unit the Bel (B) in honor of their patriarch, Alexander Graham Bell. The
decibel (dB) is formally one tenth of a Bel, and it is one of the most commonly used units in electrical
engineering, in spite of the fact that the Bel unit itself is rarely used at all.
Most fundamentally, the decibel represents a ratio of two quantities which must have the same absolute
units. The gain of an amplifier expressed in decibels is
Pout
GdB 10 log10 .
Pin
Pout and Pin both have the same units of Watts, and their ratio is thus dimensionless and expressible in
decibels. Similarly, the attenuation of a cable can also be expressed in decibels as
Pin P
AdB 10log10 10log10 out .
Pout Pin
An attenuation of +15 dB is equivalent to a gain of 15 dB. Changing the sign of the decibel value is
equivalent to flipping the ratio or reversing the roles of input and output for a transfer function. Gain and
attenuation are reciprocals of each other, so their values in dB are negatives of each other.
A cascade connection of several network blocks has a transfer function which is the product of the
individual transfer functions of each block. Consider the communication link shown in Fig. 1 below.
S1 S2 S3 S4

transmitter amplifier lossy cable receiver amplifier


T(s) C(s) R(s)
Figure 1. A typical communication link.

Written out explicitly, the transfer functions give


S2 S S S
T ( s) , C ( s) 3 , R( s) 4 , so that T (s)C (s) R(s ) 4 .
S1 S2 S3 S1
If the transmitter amplifier provided a power gain of 100, that would be +20 dB. The lossy cable might
produce a power attenuation of 26 dB. The receiver amplifier provides a power gain of 10, or +10 dB.
The use of decibel units allows the gain of the overall signal channel to be very easily computed by
simple addition: +20 dB 26 dB +10 dB = +4 dB. In other words the combined gain of the transmitter

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University of Washington Electrical Engineering & Agilent Technologies RF Laboratory

and receiver amplifiers more than compensates for the loss incurred by the cable. Using decibels, these
computations are quick and intuitive.
Measurements in decibels always refer to power. Always. The voltage gain of an amplifier or any other
electronic transfer function can be expressed in decibels according to

Pout V2 V
AVdB 10log10 10log10 out2 20log10 out ,
Pin Vin Vin
since the power is proportional to the square of the voltage. Sometimes there is confusion as to whether
to multiply by 10 or 20 when computing dB. Sometimes it is asked whether the dB means dB-Watts or
dB-Volts. Both questions illustrate a lack of understanding that decibels always refers to a power ratio.
dB is dB; one does not need to specify anything more.
To further illustrate, consider the audio power amplifier shown below.
Iin Iout

Vin Vout

power load
Pin amplifier Pout
Figure 2. An audio power amplifier.

The input impedance to the power amplifier is Zin = Vin / Iin. Likewise, the load impedance sets this ratio
on the output side, Zload = Vout / Iout. The power gain can then be expressed in terms of either the voltage
gain or the current gain, but in each case, the impedance transformation ratio Zin / Zload is also required,
2 2
Pout Vout Zin I out Z
G 2 2 load .
Pin Vin Z load I in Zin
Using decibel units this becomes
Vout Z I Z
GdB 20log10 10log10 in 20log10 out 10log10 in ,
Vin Z load I in Z load
which illustrates that voltage or current gain alone is only part of the story. Impedance transformation is
also a factor. A typical audio amplifier might take an input signal of 100 mV and turn that into an output
signal of 10 V, for a voltage gain of 100 or +40 dB. However, the input impedance of the power
amplifier may be 100 k, while the load might be only an 8 loudspeaker. The impedance
transformation ratio in this case is huge, 12,500 = +41 dB. The corresponding currents would be an input
current of 100 mV / 100 k = 1.0 A, and an output current of 10 V / 8 = 1.25 Amps. The current gain
is therefore 1.25 106 or +122 dB. Here the voltage gain and current gain give drastically different
values in decibels because neither of them have been corrected for the impedance transformation ratio.
Once that is done, one obtains GdB = +40 dB +41 dB = +81 dB using voltage, or GdB = +122 dB 41dB =
+81 dB using current. The important lesson from this sample calculation is that voltage gain or current
gain are only part of the story and any impedance transformation from input to output can also be a very
significant factor in the overall power gain. A good example of this is a unity gain buffer amplifier. The
voltage gain would be 0 dB, and it might seem as though the amplifier were providing no benefit at all.

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University of Washington Electrical Engineering & Agilent Technologies RF Laboratory

However, there can be significant power gain in the impedance transformation ratio, which is indeed what
the purpose of inserting a unity gain buffer amplifier is about.
If the system maintains the same impedance level from input to output through all of its stages, then the
voltage gains in dB are all that are needed for accurate power transfer calculations. This is the usual
situation in RF and microwave systems where all of the components along the signal path are designed to
have the same characteristic impedance, most commonly 50 . Under these circumstances, the
impedance transformation ratio is unity, or 0 dB, and the voltage gain, current gain, and power gain are all
numerically the same value in decibels.
Decibels are the preferred unit for the presentation of a transfer function on a Bode plot. Using decibels
automatically makes the vertical axis a logarithmic scale. Making the horizontal axis of frequency a
logarithmic scale then produces a log-log plot of the transfer function, which is much more convenient for
observing the big picture of what the block is doing over a wide range of frequencies and amplitudes. A
Bode plot for a single-pole low pass filter is shown in Fig. 3 below.

Figure 3. Bode plot of a low pass filter.

The Bode plot compactly reveals the performance of this low pass filter over 9 decades of amplitude and
6 decades of frequency. Over the frequency range of 400 Hz to 1 MHz, the Bode plot follows a nearly
straight line with a slope of 20 dB/decade. 20 dB is itself a factor of 10 for a voltage gain, so this slope
is equivalently one decade per decade. That represents a functional dependence for which the transfer
function is proportional to 1 / f, the asymptotic response of a single-pole low pass filter. If two poles were
contributing to the low pass function, the asymptotic response of the transfer function would be
proportional to 1 / f 2. This would correspond to a slope of two decades per decade, or equivalently 40
dB/decade. It is important to realize that transfer functions pertain to the ratio of signal amplitudes, not
powers, and thus their representation in dB involves the square of the transfer function magnitude, since
power is proportional to the square of the amplitude, with or without corrections for impedance
transformations.
A factor of 2 in power is equivalent to 3.01 dB, since 20 log10(2) = 3.01. The bandwidth of most filters is
specified at the 3 dB points, equivalent to the frequencies at which the filter passes half of the power that
it would at a mid-band frequency point. The 3 dB bandwidth of the low pass filter in Fig. 3 is 159 Hz,
equivalent to a 1.0 k resistor and 1.0 F capacitor filter section. Multiplying or dividing by a factor of
two is conveniently equivalent to adding or subtracting 3 dB.

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University of Washington Electrical Engineering & Agilent Technologies RF Laboratory

A gain, an attenuation, or any other transfer function is a dimensionless ratio of two quantities and the
decibel is very well suited for quantifying these system properties. The decibel can also be used to
quantify absolute signal or power levels when the denominator of the ratio is some known and established
reference level. In these instances, the decibel unit is decorated with a suffix to identify the appropriate
reference level. For example, the unit dBV means decibels in excess of 1 Volt. 10 Volts would therefore
be 20 dBV, remembering that power is proportional to voltage squared, and so 20log10(10 V / 1 V) = 20
dBV. Similarly, the units dBmV and dBV refer to the signal voltage relative to 1 millivolt and 1
microvolt, respectively.
By far the most commonly used dB suffix is dBm, which refers the signal power relative to 1 milliwatt.
In this case the W for Watt is dropped for convenience. The unit dBW refers to signal power relative to
1 Watt. Thus, 0 dBW = +30 dBm, a factor of 1000 = 103. When the impedance of the system is known,
it is straightforward to convert between dBm and dBV. For a 50 RF system, an average power of 0
dBm or 1 mW corresponds to an rms voltage of 0.22 Volts or 13 dBV. For a 600 audio system, the
same 0 dBm of average power would correspond to an rms voltage of 0.77 Volts or 2.2 dBV.
Another common dB suffix is dBc, which refers to the power of a signal relative to the carrier. This
usually occurs within the context of AM or FM signal modulation.

Rev. 0.0, R. B. Darling, 2013 Nov. 20

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