A scheme of discretization and reconstruction of signals

A scheme of discretizing and reconstructing continuous-time signals is proposed which is based on a system-theoretic model of continuous-time signals, and is directly implementable by real circuitry in continuous-time. A continuous-time signal is modeled as the output of a fixed continuous-time dynamical system /spl Sigma/ excited by a staircase function with a fixed width of stairs. The discretization system estimates the stair heights from a given signal so that it will be reproduced well by the reconstruction system comprising the zero-order hold and the model system /spl Sigma/.