DISCRETE SIGNAL

A 'discrete signal' or 'discrete-time signal' is a time series, perhaps a signal that has been sampled from a continuous-time signal.
Unlike a continuous-time signal, a discrete-time signal is not a function of a continuous-time argument, but is a sequence of quantities; that is, a function over a domain of discrete integers.
Each value in the sequence is called a sample.
When a discrete-time signal is a sequence corresponding to uniformly spaced times, it has an associated sampling rate; the sampling rate is not apparent in the data sequence, so may be associated as a separate data item.

Contents

Digital signals

See also

Digital signals

A digital signal is a discrete-time signal that takes on only a discrete set of values.
It typically derives from a discrete signal that has been quantized.
Common practical digital signals are represented as 8-bit (256 levels), 16-bit (65,536 levels), 32-bit (4.3 billion levels), and so on, though any number of quantization levels is possible, not just powers of two.

See also

★ Aliasing, Anti-aliasing filter

★ Analog-to-digital converter, Digital-to-analog converter

★ Continuous signal

★ Digital control

★ Digital frequency

★ Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem

★ Whittaker–Shannon interpolation formula

★ Sample (signal)

★ Sampling (signal processing)

★ Signal (electrical engineering)