A unified formulation of segment companding laws and synthesis of codecs and digital compandors

Segment companding laws are being considered for use in PCM to cater to the possibility of digital processing of uniformly quantized signals. A unified formulation of the segment companding laws is presented, which permits the detailed structure of quantization to be explicitly characterized. Most important, it is shown that this formulation yields algorithms for the systematic synthesis of coders, decoders, and digital compandors. Examples of circuits synthesized from the algorithms are shown for two segment law companding families — the μ-law and the A-law.