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Pulse Shaping:
It is the process of changing the waveform of transmitted pulses. Its purpose is to
make the transmitted signal better suited to its purpose or the communication channel,
typically by limiting the effective bandwidth of the transmission. By filtering the transmitted
pulses this way, the inter symbol interference caused by the channel can be kept in control. In
RF communication, pulse shaping is essential for making the signal fit in its frequency band.
Typically pulse shaping occurs after line coding and modulation.

Need for pulse shaping

Transmitting a signal at high modulation rate through a band-limited channel can

create inter symbol interference. As the modulation rate increases, the signal's bandwidth
increases. When the signal's bandwidth becomes larger than the channel bandwidth, the
channel starts to introduce distortion to the signal. This distortion usually manifests itself as
inter symbol interference.
The signal's spectrum is determined by the modulation scheme and data rate used by the
transmitter, but can be modified with a pulse shaping filter. Usually the transmitted symbols
are represented as a time sequence of dirac delta pulses. This theoretical signal is then filtered
with the pulse shaping filter, producing the transmitted signal.
In many base band communication systems the pulse shaping filter is implicitly a boxcar
filter. Its Fourier transform is of the form sin(x)/x, and has significant signal power at
frequencies higher than symbol rate. This is not a big problem when optical fibre or even
twisted pair cable is used as the communication channel. However, in RF communications
this would waste bandwidth, and only tightly specified frequency bands are used for single
transmissions. In other words, the channel for the signal is band-limited. Therefore better
filters have been developed, which attempt to minimize the bandwidth needed for a certain
symbol rate.
An example in other areas of electronics is the generation of pulses where the rise time need
to be short; one way to do this is to start with a slower-rising pulse, and decrease the rise
time, for example with a step recovery diode circuit

Pulse shaping filters:

Not every filter can be used as a pulse shaping filter. The filter itself must not
introduce inter symbol interference — it needs to satisfy certain criteria. The Nyquist ISI
criterion is a commonly used criterion for evaluation, because it relates the frequency
spectrum of the transmitter signal to intersymbol interference.
Examples of pulse shaping filters that are commonly found in communication systems are:
• Sinc shaped filter

• Raised-cosine filter

• Gaussian filter

Sender side pulse shaping is often combined with a receiver side matched filter to achieve
optimum tolerance for noise in the system. In this case the pulse shaping is equally
distributed between the sender and receiver filters. The filters' amplitude responses are thus
point wise square roots of the system filters.
Eye Diagram:
When a digital signal is passed through a channel of limited bandwidth, it gets distorted. This
distortion is manifested as pulse spread or rounding of sharp corners. Therefore the values in
the previous sampling intervals affect the values within the present interval. When all the
possible output pulse shapes within the signalling interval for all possible sequences are
superimposed, a pattern resembling the eye is observed. This pattern is called as eye pattern
or eye diagram. Eye pattern is a simple but powerful measurement method for assessing the
data handling ability of a digital transmission system. This method has been extensively used
for evaluating the performance of wired systems and also can be applied to optical fibre data
links. By the eye pattern measurements, the above mentioned distortion can be viewed on an
oscilloscope.

Generation of Eye Pattern: The generation of eye pattern can be explained with Figs. 2.2
and 2.3.

Fig. 2.2: Generation of eye pattern. The bit sequences 011, 001, 100, and 110 are
superimposed over one another to obtain the final eye diagram.

Here each bit is disturbed by the preceding and the following bits. Considering a rectangular
input signal, Fig. 2.2 shows the detected signal d(t), as the superposition of impulse response
for different bit combinations. The signal distortion and hence the reason for different lines in
the eye pattern is the pulse dispersion arising from the limited transmission bandwidth. This
can be due to filtering also. Pulse dispersion involves interference from neighbouring pulses
or bits and therefore, results in a mutual distortion. System degradation due to ISI is higher,
when the neighbouring bits have mutually interfered. Simultaneously, the number of lines on
the eye pattern will increase. This implies that at a constant bit rate R (=1/T), the higher
transmission bandwidth implies, a weaker ISI and lesser number of lines. Again at constant
transmission bandwidth, lower bit rates imply weaker ISI and hence lesser number of lines in
the eye pattern. The number of lines in the eye pattern is given by k = 2 a+ b+1 , where ‘a’ and
‘b’ are the numbers of the disturbed bits after and before the bits of current interest.
Eye Aperture: In a digital receiver, the detected signal d(t) is sampled at the centre of each
bit. If the sampled value (VT+t) is either above or below threshold ‘E’, symbol ‘1’ or symbol
‘0’ is detected respectively, i.e.,
d (VT + t) > E = ‘1’
d (VT + t) < E = ‘0’
When the sampled value is very close to the threshold, then even a small noise level may be
high enough to cause error. The probability of error becomes maximum for those bit
sequences which are responsible for the inner lines in the eye pattern. These sequences are
known as worst case pattern. In practice, the worst case pattern is widely given by 0001000
and 1110111. The eye aperture is well suited and is a powerful measure to assess system
performance and to determine the probability of error. In general, the smaller the eye aperture,
higher the probability of error. A great deal of system performance information can be
deduced form one pattern display. To interpret the eye pattern, the simplified diagram is
given in Fig. 2.4.

Fig. 2.4: Eye pattern

An effective way to study the effect of ISI is Eye Pattern. Its name was given from its
resemblence to human eye for binary waves. The interior region of eye pattern is called the
eye opening .
Jitter is the short-term variation of the instant of digital signal from its ideal position,
which may lead to data errors. When the effect of ISI increases, traces from upper portion to
lower portion of the eye opening increases and the eye gets completely closed, if ISI is very
high. An eye pattern provides the following information about a particular system:

 Actual eye patterns are used to estimate the bit error rate and the signal-to-noise ratio.
 The width of eye opening defines one time interval over which the received signal can be
sampled without error from the ISI.
 The best time to sample one received waveform is when height of the eye opening is
largest. This height is reduced as a result of amplitude distortion in the data signal.
 The vertical distance between the top of the eye pattern opening and the maximum signal
level gives the maximum distortion. The more the eye closes, the more difficult it is to
distinguish between ones and zeros in the signal.
 Eye opening for undistorted signal is maximum. As the available bandwidth is reduced,
the opening reduces.
 When the channel is noisy, the opening will be reduced and noise margin will reduce.
The margin reduces as channel noise increases.