Digital modulation techniques are classified into coherent and noncoherent techniques, depending on whether the receiver is equipped with a phase-recovery circuit or not. The phase-recovery circuit ensures that the local oscillator in the receiver is synchronized to the incoming carrier wave (in both frequency and phase).

There are just TWO types of digital modulation techniques.

RISC processors only use simple instructions that can be executed within one clock cycle. Thus, the "MULT" command described above could be divided into three separate commands: "LOAD," which moves data from the memory bank to a register, "PROD," which finds the product of two operands located within the registers, and "STORE," which moves data from a register to the memory banks. In order to perform the exact series of steps described in the CISC approach, a programmer would need to code four lines of assembly.

The number of steps must correspond to the number of code lines.