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In the context of digital signal processing , a digital signal is a discrete time, quantized amplitude signal. In other words, it is a sampled signal consisting of samples that take on values from a discrete set. If that discrete set is finite, the discrete values can be represented with digital words of a finite width. Most commonly, these discrete values are represented as fixed-point words or floating-point words.
The process of analog-to-digital conversion produces a digital signal. The conversion process can be thought of as occurring in two steps:
It can be shown that an analog signal can be reconstructed after conversion to digital , provided that the signal has negligible power in frequencies above the Nyquist limit and does not saturate the quantizer.
Common practical digital signals are represented as 8-bit , 16-bit , 24-bit and 32-bit using pulse-code modulation where the number of quantization levels is not necessarily limited to powers of two. A floating point representation is used in many DSP applications.