Patent ID: 8792578

Claim:
A method for processing a time-varying signal having an amplitude component A(t), comprising: quantizing A(t) to produce a time series Â(t) having M levels; modulating a clock signal in response to Â(t), thereby to produce a control signal, wherein: the modulating step is performed on frames of the clock signal, each frame containing 2M pulses, wherein M is a nonzero integer; each modulated frame is associated with a portion of Â(t) having a quantized signal level and a pulse code symbol identified with said level; and for each of at least some frames, the modulating step configures the control signal to skip selected switched-output pulses in accordance with the pulse code symbol associated with that frame based on a parameter that is incrementally varied over a range of determined values for selecting an amount of skipped pulses in a given pulse code symbol; switching among at least three different power supply output levels in response to the control signal, thereby to generate an output pulse stream of positive and negative pulses, wherein the output pulse stream has three or more signal levels, and wherein each of the switched-output pulses is a correlate of a pulse of the clock signal; and filtering the output pulse stream, thereby to produce an output signal s(t).