Effect of amplitude clipping in DMT-ADSL transceivers

An analytical expression is derived for the signal-to-noise ratio due to the clipping of the amplitude of a discrete multitone (DMT) signal to a predetermined level. Using this expression, it is shown that a significant reduction in the number of bits (between 2 and 3 bits) of the A/D-D/A convertor can be obtained by clipping, while keeping the same signal-to-noise ratio as when clipping is not applied. These results indicate that clipping can be applied to DMT-based a symmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) transceivers without system performance degradation and with the important advantage of reducing its VLSI implementation complexity.