QUESTION 2 [35 marks]

(a) A new ICU room is equipped with a central station for simultaneous monitoring of
electrocardiograms (ECG) of 10 patients. The data for 10 patients are brought to a processing
center over wires and are sampled, quantized, binary coded and time division multiplexed.
The multiplexed data are then transmitted to the monitoring station. As an engineer, you’re
asked to design the ECG monitoring transmitter system based on the following specifications:

 The ECG signal is 200Hz with voltage range of 0-5V

 The maximum tolerable error in sample amplitudes is 0.25% of peak signal

amplitude.

 The signal must be sampled at least 25% above the Nyquist sampling rate.

 Framing and synchronization (FS) requires additional 1.25% of total data bits. The FS
is added at the beginning of each frame.

(i) The design should include transmitter system block diagram (indicate all the key
parameters at all stages), the achievable performances from each source (SNR, bit rate
and cable bandwidth), and the transmission bit rate.

[12 marks]

(ii) Suggest a strategy to improve the output SNR from each source to become at least
66dB. Determine the new transmission bit rate to support this requirement.

[3 marks]
(b) A bit stream of 110000 is to be transmitted.

(i) Draw the encoded signal using NRZ.

[1 mark]
(ii) The encoded signal in (i) is then tested for serial data transmission. However, the test
result shows that it is difficult to detect the clock rate. Why?

[1 mark]
(iii) Suggest a suitable encoding technique to overcome the problem in (ii), draw the
proposed encoded signal.

[3 marks]
(c) Statistically, it is found that smaller amplitudes predominate in speech and larger
amplitudes are much less frequent. This means the SNR will be low most of the time due
to poor resolution in the smaller amplitudes. The problem can be solved using smaller step
size for smaller amplitudes and larger step size for larger amplitude. This technique is
called non-linear quantizing. Assume the speech signal of ±3072mV is to be transmitted
using 8 bit PCM codes and the most significant bit is used for sign bit. Table 1 shows the
voltage range and the level range of the non-linear quantizing. Determine the SNR
improvement achieved by the non-linear quantizing compared to the linear quantizing for
sampled voltage of 140mV.

[5 marks]
 Table 1: Voltage range and level range of the non-linear quantizing

Voltage range Level

(mV) range
1536-3072 111-127
768-1536 95-111
384-768 79-95
192-384 63-79
96-192 47-63
48-96 31-47
24-48 15-31
0-24 0-15

(d) The A-Law compression equation is shown as below:-

For a compressor with A = 87.6,

(i) Determine the compressed voltage gain for the following relative values of , which
are 0.9, , , . in Vmax Vmax 7.0Vmax 5.0V max 3.0V

[4 marks]

(ii) Determine the compressed output voltages for a maximum input voltage of 5V.

[2 marks]
(iii) Calculate the input and output dynamic ranges and compression.

[3 marks]

(iv) For a compression with A = 1, determine the voltage gain.

[1 mark]