Binary Transversal Filters for PAM Pulse Generation with Correlative Coding

High-speed pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) data transmission systems require carefully shaped pulses having small bandwidth, and various coding schemes are used to increase transmission efficiency via spectrum shaping. Traditional hardware for the generation of such pulses, whether coded or not, is both difficult to design and expensive to implement. The binary transversal filter (BTF) has recently been studied in this context, and shown to be a promising alternative to other methods. It is inherently a binary device, however, and some coding schemes require multilevel signal outputs. Simple methods are presented in this paper that permit the use of a BTF for generating pulses such as bipolar, partial response, etc. The additional hardware required when coding is used is shown to be trivial in most cases.