Signals

Electric Signals

A signal as referred to in communication systems, signal processing, and electrical engineering "is a function that conveys information about the behavior or attributes of some phenomenon". In the physical world, any quantity exhibiting variation in time or variation in space (such as an image) is potentially a signal that might provide information on the status of a physical system, or convey a message between observers, among other possibilities. The IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing elaborates upon the term "signal" as follows: The term "signal" includes, among others, audio, video, speech, image, communication, geophysical, sonar, radar, medical and musical signals.

Other examples of signals are the output of a thermocouple, which conveys temperature information, and the output of a pH meter which conveys acidity information. Typically, signals are often provided by a sensor, and often the original form of a signal is converted to another form of energy using a transducer. For example, a microphone converts an acoustic signal to a voltage waveform, and a speaker does the reverse.

 The formal study of the information content of signals is the field of information theory. The information in a signal is usually accompanied by noise. The term noise usually means an undesirable random disturbance, but is often extended to include unwanted signals conflicting with the desired signal (such as crosstalk). The prevention of noise is covered in part under the heading of signal integrity. The separation of desired signals from a background is the field of signal recovery, one branch of which is estimation theory, a probabilistic approach to suppressing random disturbances.

Engineering disciplines such as electrical engineering have led the way in the design, study, and implementation of systems involving transmission, storage, and manipulation of information. In the latter half of the 20th century, electrical engineering itself separated into several disciplines, Specializing in the design and analysis of systems that manipulate physical signals; electronic engineering and computer engineering as examples; while design engineering developed to deal with functional design of man–machine interfaces.