A dead-zone quantizer is a type of mid-tread quantizer with symmetric behavior around 0. The region around the zero output value of such a quantizer is referred to as the "dead zone" or "deadband". The dead zone can sometimes serve the same purpose as a noise gate or squelch function. Especially for compression applications, the dead-zone may be given a different width than that for the other steps. For an otherwise-uniform quantizer, the dead-zone width can be set to any value formula_18 by using the forward quantization rule