Random rounding: Some principles and applications

Truncation and rounding operations in digital signal processing introduce harmonic and intermodulation distortion for low level inputs or pure signal inputs. A two step random rounding procedure alleviates these problems by introducing "white" quantization noise. Some results bearing on the quantization noise levels as a function of input level and on linearity are presented. In one application a simple recursive integrator is found to have dramatic correlated quantization error affects unless random rounding is employed.