The transmission of 8-bit µ-law PCM signals using 16-level weighted QAM over Gaussian channels is examined. The weighting process modifies the positions of the QAM constellation points so that the overall distortion in the recovered information-bearing source signal is reduced. The PCM bits are mapped to the weighted QAM points such that the most significant bits have a lower probability of being in error than the least significant bits. The weighted QAM systems have been optimized for the same energy signal energy per transmitted symbol as for unweighted QAM. Also, the erasure zone is established at the detector, such that if the output falls into the erasure zone, the regenerated sample is replaced by interpolation. The theoretical results indicates that 16-level weighted QAM have a gain of 5dB over unweighted QAM.

Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) schemes are attractive in terms of bandwidth efficiency and offer a number of subchannels with different integrities via both Gaussian and Rayleigh-fading channels. Specifically, the 16-QAM phasor constellation has two, while the 64-QAM possesses three such subchannels, which become dramatically different via Rayleigh-fading channels. The analytically derived bit error rate (BER) formulae yield virtually identical curves with simulation results, exhibiting adequate BERs for the highest integrity subchannels of both 16-QAM and 64-QAM to be further reduced by forward error correction coding (FEC). However, the BERs of the lower integrity subchannels require fading compensation to reduce their values for FEC techniques to become effective. This property creates ground for a variety of carefully matched, embedded mobile transmission schemes of different complexities. The practical implementation of such an embedded scheme is demonstrated by a low-cost, low-complexity and low-consumption 50KBd mobile video telephone scheme offering adequate speech and image quality for channel SNRs in excess of about 20dB via Rayleigh-fading channels.

An extremely accurate and very wide-band quadrature modulator IC fabricated on a single chip using bipolar technology is presented. The characteristics of this quadrature modulator IC are much superior to conventional ones (modulation phase error and deviation from quadrature is about 1/10), and this IC is applicable to high modulation schemes such as 256 QAM. In this circuit, the phase difference between local signals input to each of two balanced modulators is detected by a phase detector, and a variable phase shifter in the local port is controlled automatically by the detected signals. This, along with the use of a wide-band variable phase shifter, enables the phase difference between the local signals input to the balanced modulators to be adaptively controlled to 90 degrees in wide frequency bands. In addition, a design method for the balanced modulators to obtain small modulation phase error is described. Based on this design method, a highly accurate quadrature modulator IC was fabricated, in which two balanced modulators, the phase detector, and the variable phase shifter were integrated on a single chip. Phase deviation from quadrature in the local signals was reduced to less than 0.3 degrees in the wide frequency bands of more tham 60 MHz. The modulation phase error of the balanced modulators wes less than 0.2 degrees at 140 MHz, and less than 2.5 degrees at up to 1.3 GHz.