Chip Rate, Symbol Rate and Bit Rate

10,230

In digital communications, each symbol may encode one or more bits. Very simple modulation schemes, e.g. PSK, just encode one bit per symbol, but more sophisticated schemes can encode several bits per symbol, e.g. QPSK encodes 2 bits per symbol. Hence the symbol rate (symbols per second, aka baud) may be less than bit rate (bits per second).

Chip rate is a term which is specific to spread spectrum communication - a symbol is represented by a number of chips, hence the symbol rate is lower than the chip rate.

Share:
10,230
Kiran
Author by

Kiran

Hello, I am a full-time freelancer based in India. I am a self-taught software developer working on a number of technologies. Most of the time, I will be working in Python, Matlab, PHP/MySQL, C#, bash scripting. If you looking at my profile after seeing some of the questions/answers I have posted in this forum, I probably have the solution. Contact me at [email protected], I would be happy to help you. My interests include : Data Analysis, Data Science Data Mining, Web scraping (Have worked extensively with www.mca.gov.in, CIBIL, Bloomberg.com) API Development/Integration Blockchain I work here & here and can be reachable on Telegram here

Updated on June 13, 2022

Comments

  • Kiran
    Kiran almost 2 years

    I would like to understand what is Chip rate, Symbol rate and bit rate.

    How is it different ?

  • Kiran
    Kiran almost 13 years
    Thank you so much for your answer. Now I can understand the 802.11b Standard more clearly.