Behavior of quantization noise for sinusoidal signals. A revision.

This paper presents a brief revision of several studies presented in the literature about the behavior of quantization noise for sinusoidal signals and for uniform quantizers. From this revision, the conclusion is that quantization noise has been assumed to be additive and has a white spectrum, although some published studies, considering the problem either from a deterministic point of view or from a stochastic one, have shown a different noise behavior for some specific cases. Some of these cases are related with the parameters that characterize the sinusoidal signal and other with the conditions under which the process of conversion is realized. There are some cases that have not very been well considered in the previous literature and about which it is convenient to call attention. By this reason and using computer simulations with sinusoidal input signals, it is illustrated here that the quantization noise spectrum can show a discrete or complex structure depending on the relation between the sampling rate used and the frequency of the signal. Moreover, some points to consider in order to get a better description of the quantization noise are presented.