Multiplierless implementation of an aliasing-free digital pulsewidth modulator

Journal article, 2013

Digital pulsewidth modulators are used to transform nonconstant amplitude signals into pulsed signals, such that the information lying in the signal amplitude is encoded in the widths of pulses. Because of the inherent aliasing distortion in digital pulsewidth-modulated signals, additional signal processing steps are required to make pulsewidth modulation (PWM) suitable for applications like digital audio amplification or burst-mode radio-frequency transmitters. These processing steps, however, entail an undesirable increase in computational effort. This brief presents a multiplierless implementation of a digital aliasing-free pulsewidth modulator using lookup tables, adders, and arithmetic shifts only. Mathematical equations of asymmetric double-edge PWM are given, as well as a modified aliasing-free version of this PWM technique that directly integrates the distortion-avoiding signal processing steps into the pulsewidth modulator. Based on these equations, a multiplierless implementation of the aliasing-free PWM (AF-PWM) is developed. Simulation results obtained with a Simulink fixed-point model show that the proposed modulator implementation provides a feasible solution for realizing AF-PWM with low computational effort.