Ringing (signal)

Last updated
An illustration of overshoot, followed by ringing and settle time. High accuracy settling time measurements figure 1.png
An illustration of overshoot, followed by ringing and settle time.

In electronics, signal processing, and video, ringing is oscillation of a signal, particularly in the step response (the response to a sudden change in input). Often ringing is undesirable, but not always, as in the case of resonant inductive coupling. It is also known as hunting. [1]

Contents

It is also known as ripple, particularly in electricity or in frequency domain response.

Electrical circuits

In electrical circuits, ringing is an oscillation of a voltage or current. Ringing can be undesirable because it causes extra current to flow, thereby wasting energy and causing extra heating of the components; it can cause unwanted electromagnetic radiation to be emitted[ citation needed ]; it can increase settling time for the desired final state; and it may cause unwanted triggering of bistable elements in digital circuits. Ringy communications circuits may suffer falsing.

Two electrical sources of this ringing are:

  1. A resonant transient response due to undesired parasitic capacitances and inductances in the circuit creating a resonant frequency. [2] This is often the damping response following overshoot or undershoot, and thus these related concepts are at times conflated. This ringing can be reduced by a slower slew rate and possibly eliminated by critically dampening the resonance.
  2. Signal reflection, which may be minimized by impedance matching.

While either issue can be addressed with a series termination resistor, a resistor cannot simultaneously critically damp the response and perfectly match the impedance without losing some power on the series resistor, so a bypass capacitor may be preferred. [3]

Analog video

In a cathode-ray tube (CRT) video circuit, electrical ringing causes closely spaced repeated ghosts of a vertical or diagonal edge where dark changes to light or vice versa, going from left to right, whereby the electron beam's intensity overshoots and undershoots the desired intensity there a few times instead of settling quickly. This bouncing could occur anywhere in the electronics or cabling and is often caused by or accentuated by a too high setting of the sharpness control.

Analog audio

Ringing can affect audio equipment in a number of ways. Audio amplifiers can produce ringing depending on their design, although the transients that can produce such ringing rarely occur in audio signals.

Transducers (i.e., microphones and loudspeakers) can also ring. Mechanical ringing is more of a problem with loudspeakers as the moving masses are larger and less easily damped, but unless extreme they are difficult to audibly identify.

Signal processing

In signal processing, "ringing" may refer to ringing artifacts: spurious signals near sharp transitions. These have a number of causes, and occur for instance in JPEG compression and as pre-echo in some digital audio compression.

Signals constructed as only a partial (not infinite) Fourier series of a function containing discontinuities (e.g. when applying a brickwall lowpass filter to a square wave) create a ringing error called the Gibbs phenomenon before and after each discontinuity.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amplifier</span> Electronic device/component that increases the strength of a signal

An amplifier, electronic amplifier or (informally) amp is an electronic device that can increase the magnitude of a signal. It is a two-port electronic circuit that uses electric power from a power supply to increase the amplitude of a signal applied to its input terminals, producing a proportionally greater amplitude signal at its output. The amount of amplification provided by an amplifier is measured by its gain: the ratio of output voltage, current, or power to input. An amplifier is defined as a circuit that has a power gain greater than one.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Loudspeaker</span> Converts an electrical audio signal into a corresponding sound

A loudspeaker is an electroacoustic transducer that converts an electrical audio signal into a corresponding sound. A speaker system, also often simply referred to as a speaker or loudspeaker, comprises one or more such speaker drivers, an enclosure, and electrical connections possibly including a crossover network. The speaker driver can be viewed as a linear motor attached to a diaphragm which couples that motor's movement to motion of air, that is, sound. An audio signal, typically from a microphone, recording, or radio broadcast, is amplified electronically to a power level capable of driving that motor in order to reproduce the sound corresponding to the original unamplified electronic signal. This is thus the opposite function to the microphone; indeed the dynamic speaker driver, by far the most common type, is a linear motor in the same basic configuration as the dynamic microphone which uses such a motor in reverse, as a generator.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microphone</span> Device that converts sound into an electrical signal

A microphone, colloquially called a mic, is a transducer that converts sound into an electrical signal. Microphones are used in many applications such as telephones, hearing aids, public address systems for concert halls and public events, motion picture production, live and recorded audio engineering, sound recording, two-way radios, megaphones, and radio and television broadcasting. They are also used in computers and other electronic devices, such as mobile phones, for recording sounds, speech recognition, VoIP, and other purposes, such as ultrasonic sensors or knock sensors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Audio crossover</span> Electronic filter circuitry used in loudspeakers

Audio crossovers are a type of electronic filter circuitry that splits an audio signal into two or more frequency ranges, so that the signals can be sent to loudspeaker drivers that are designed to operate within different frequency ranges. The crossover filters can be either active or passive. They are often described as two-way or three-way, which indicate, respectively, that the crossover splits a given signal into two frequency ranges or three frequency ranges. Crossovers are used in loudspeaker cabinets, power amplifiers in consumer electronics and pro audio and musical instrument amplifier products. For the latter two markets, crossovers are used in bass amplifiers, keyboard amplifiers, bass and keyboard speaker enclosures and sound reinforcement system equipment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Impedance matching</span> Adjusting input/output impedances of an electrical circuit for some purpose

In electrical engineering, impedance matching is the practice of designing or adjusting the input impedance or output impedance of an electrical device for a desired value. Often, the desired value is selected to maximize power transfer or minimize signal reflection. For example, impedance matching typically is used to improve power transfer from a radio transmitter via the interconnecting transmission line to the antenna. Signals on a transmission line will be transmitted without reflections if the transmission line is terminated with a matching impedance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Electrical termination</span> Transmission line impedance matching

In electronics, electrical termination is the practice of ending a transmission line with a device that matches the characteristic impedance of the line. Termination prevents signals from reflecting off the end of the transmission line. Reflections at the ends of unterminated transmission lines cause distortion, which can produce ambiguous digital signal levels and misoperation of digital systems. Reflections in analog signal systems cause such effects as video ghosting, or power loss in radio transmitter transmission lines.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Active filter</span> Analog circuit which filters an electronic signal using an amplifier

An active filter is a type of analog circuit implementing an electronic filter using active components, typically an amplifier. Amplifiers included in a filter design can be used to improve the cost, performance and predictability of a filter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Damping factor</span>

In an audio system, the damping factor is defined as the ratio of the rated impedance of the loudspeaker to the source impedance of the power amplifier, and was propsed in 1941. Only the magnitude of the loudspeaker impedance is used, and the power amplifier output impedance is assumed to be totally resistive.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Electronic filter</span> Electronic device

Electronic filters are a type of signal processing filter in the form of electrical circuits. This article covers those filters consisting of lumped electronic components, as opposed to distributed-element filters. That is, using components and interconnections that, in analysis, can be considered to exist at a single point. These components can be in discrete packages or part of an integrated circuit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Electrical resonance</span> Canceling impedances at a particular frequency

Electrical resonance occurs in an electric circuit at a particular resonant frequency when the impedances or admittances of circuit elements cancel each other. In some circuits, this happens when the impedance between the input and output of the circuit is almost zero and the transfer function is close to one.

The chief electrical characteristic of a dynamic loudspeaker's driver is its electrical impedance as a function of frequency. It can be visualized by plotting it as a graph, called the impedance curve.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Transient response</span> Response of a system to a change from an equilibrium state

In electrical engineering and mechanical engineering, a transient response is the response of a system to a change from an equilibrium or a steady state. The transient response is not necessarily tied to abrupt events but to any event that affects the equilibrium of the system. The impulse response and step response are transient responses to a specific input.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Transformer types</span> Overview of electrical transformer types

A variety of types of electrical transformer are made for different purposes. Despite their design differences, the various types employ the same basic principle as discovered in 1831 by Michael Faraday, and share several key functional parts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zobel network</span>

Zobel networks are a type of filter section based on the image-impedance design principle. They are named after Otto Zobel of Bell Labs, who published a much-referenced paper on image filters in 1923. The distinguishing feature of Zobel networks is that the input impedance is fixed in the design independently of the transfer function. This characteristic is achieved at the expense of a much higher component count compared to other types of filter sections. The impedance would normally be specified to be constant and purely resistive. For this reason, Zobel networks are also known as constant resistance networks. However, any impedance achievable with discrete components is possible.

On-die termination (ODT) is the technology where the termination resistor for impedance matching in transmission lines is located inside a semiconductor chip instead of on a printed circuit board (PCB).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ringing artifacts</span> Form of error in digital signals; spurious signals near sharp transitions

In signal processing, particularly digital image processing, ringing artifacts are artifacts that appear as spurious signals near sharp transitions in a signal. Visually, they appear as bands or "ghosts" near edges; audibly, they appear as "echos" near transients, particularly sounds from percussion instruments; most noticeable are the pre-echos. The term "ringing" is because the output signal oscillates at a fading rate around a sharp transition in the input, similar to a bell after being struck. As with other artifacts, their minimization is a criterion in filter design.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Overshoot (signal)</span> When a signal or function exceeds its target

In signal processing, control theory, electronics, and mathematics, overshoot is the occurrence of a signal or function exceeding its target. Undershoot is the same phenomenon in the opposite direction. It arises especially in the step response of bandlimited systems such as low-pass filters. It is often followed by ringing, and at times conflated with the latter.

Analogue filters are a basic building block of signal processing much used in electronics. Amongst their many applications are the separation of an audio signal before application to bass, mid-range, and tweeter loudspeakers; the combining and later separation of multiple telephone conversations onto a single channel; the selection of a chosen radio station in a radio receiver and rejection of others.

Nominal impedance in electrical engineering and audio engineering refers to the approximate designed impedance of an electrical circuit or device. The term is applied in a number of different fields, most often being encountered in respect of:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">RLC circuit</span> Resistor Inductor Capacitor Circuit

An RLC circuit is an electrical circuit consisting of a resistor (R), an inductor (L), and a capacitor (C), connected in series or in parallel. The name of the circuit is derived from the letters that are used to denote the constituent components of this circuit, where the sequence of the components may vary from RLC.

References

  1. Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. 1989. f. The action of a machine, instrument, system, etc., that is hunting (see hunt v. 7b); an undesirable oscillation about an equilibrium speed, position, or state.
  2. Johnson, H. and Graham, M. High-Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic. 1993. pp. 88–90
  3. Peterson, Zachariah (2023-01-09) [2019-08-19]. "Damping and Reflection Transfer with a Series Termination Resistor". Altium . Archived from the original on 2023-01-30. Retrieved 2024-01-09.