Design and Analysis of Hardware-limited Non-uniform Task-based Quantizers

Hardware-limited task-based quantization is a new design paradigm for data acquisition systems equipped with serial scalar analog-to-digital converters using a small number of bits. By taking into account the underlying system task, task-based quantizers can efficiently recover the desired parameters from the low-bit quantized observation. Current design and analysis frameworks for hardware-limited task-based quantization are only applicable to inputs with bounded support and uniform quantizers with non-subtractive dithering. Here, we propose a new framework based on generalized Bussgang decomposition that enables the design and analysis of hardware-limited task-based quantizers that are equipped with non-uniform scalar quantizers or that have inputs with unbounded support. We first consider the scenario in which the task is linear. Under this scenario, we derive new pre-quantization and post-quantization linear mappings for task-based quantizers with mean squared error (MSE) that closely matches the theoretical MSE. Next, we extend the proposed analysis framework to quadratic tasks. We demonstrate that our derived analytical expression for the MSE accurately predicts the performance of task-based quantizers with quadratic tasks.