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Implementing Impractical Digital Filters

Rick Lyons July 19, 20162 comments

This blog discusses a problematic situation that can arise when we try to implement certain digital filters. Occasionally in the literature of DSP we encounter impractical digital IIR filter block diagrams, and by impractical I mean block diagrams that cannot be implemented. This blog gives examples of impractical digital IIR filters and what can be done to make them practical.

Implementing an Impractical Filter: Example 1

Reference [1] presented the digital IIR bandpass filter...


Filter a Rectangular Pulse with no Ringing

Neil Robertson May 12, 201610 comments

To filter a rectangular pulse without any ringing, there is only one requirement on the filter coefficients:  they must all be positive.  However, if we want the leading and trailing edge of the pulse to be symmetrical, then the coefficients must be symmetrical.  What we are describing is basically a window function.

Consider a rectangular pulse 32 samples long with fs = 1 kHz.  Here is the Matlab code to generate the pulse:

N= 64; fs= 1000; % Hz sample...

Dealing With Fixed Point Fractions

Mike January 5, 20163 comments

Fixed point fractional representation always gives me a headache because I screw it up the first time I try to implement an algorithm. The difference between integer operations and fractional operations is in the overflow.  If the representation fits in the fixed point result, you can not tell the difference between fixed point integer and fixed point fractions.  When integers overflow, they lose data off the most significant bits.  When fractions overflow, they lose data off...


The DFT Output and Its Dimensions

Leonid Ovanesyan December 29, 20155 comments

The Discrete Fourier Transform, or DFT, converts a signal from discrete time to discrete frequency. It is commonly implemented as and used as the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). This article will attempt to clarify the format of the DFT output and how it is produced.

Living in the real world, we deal with real signals. The data we typically sample does not have an imaginary component. For example, the voltage sampled by a receiver is a real value at a particular point in time. Let’s...


Amplitude modulation and the sampling theorem

Allen Downey December 18, 20156 comments

I am working on the 11th and probably final chapter of Think DSP, which follows material my colleague Siddhartan Govindasamy developed for a class at Olin College.  He introduces amplitude modulation as a clever way to sneak up on the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem.

Most of the code for the chapter is done: you can check it out in this IPython notebook.  I haven't written the text yet, but I'll outline it here, and paste in the key figures.

Convolution...


Exponential Smoothing with a Wrinkle

Cedron Dawg December 17, 20154 comments
Introduction

This is an article to hopefully give a better understanding to the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) by providing a set of preprocessing filters to improve the resolution of the DFT. Because of the exponential nature of sinusoidal functions, they have special mathematical properties when exponential smoothing is applied to them. These properties are derived and explained in this blog article.

Basic Exponential Smoothing

Exponential smoothing is also known as...


Discrete-Time PLLs, Part 1: Basics

Reza Ameli December 1, 20159 comments

In this series of tutorials on discrete-time PLLs we will be focusing on Phase-Locked Loops that can be implemented in discrete-time signal proessors such as FPGAs, DSPs and of course, MATLAB.


Compressive Sensing - Recovery of Sparse Signals (Part 1)

Mamoon November 28, 2015

The amount of data that is generated has been increasing at a substantial rate since the beginning of the digital revolution. The constraints on the sampling and reconstruction of digital signals are derived from the well-known Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem...


Analytic Signal

Mehdi November 26, 20155 comments

In communication theory and modulation theory we always deal with two phases: In-phase (I) and Quadrature-phase (Q). The question that I will discuss in this blog is that why we use two phases and not more.


Multilayer Perceptrons and Event Classification with data from CODEC using Scilab and Weka

David Norwood November 25, 2015

For my first blog, I thought I would introduce the reader to Scilab [1] and Weka [2]. In order to illustrate how they work, I will put together a script in Scilab that will sample using the microphone and CODEC on your PC and save the waveform as a CSV file.


Multilayer Perceptrons and Event Classification with data from CODEC using Scilab and Weka

David Norwood November 25, 2015

For my first blog, I thought I would introduce the reader to Scilab [1] and Weka [2]. In order to illustrate how they work, I will put together a script in Scilab that will sample using the microphone and CODEC on your PC and save the waveform as a CSV file.


A brief look at multipath radio channels

Markus Nentwig October 31, 20078 comments

Summary: Discussion of multipath propagation and fading in radio links

Radio channels, their effects on communications links and how to model them are a popular topic on comp.dsp. Unfortunately, for many of us there is little or no opportunity to get any "hands-on" experience with radio-related issues, because the required RF measurement equipment is not that easily available.

This article gives a very simple example of a radio link that shows multipath propagation and...


Instant CIC

Markus Nentwig May 8, 20124 comments

Summary:

A floating point model for a CIC decimator, including the frequency response.

Description:

A CIC filter relies on a peculiarity of its fixed-point implementation: Normal operation involves repeated internal overflows that have no effect to the output signal, as they cancel in the following stage.

One way to put it intuitively is that only the speed (and rate of change) of every little "wheel" in the clockworks carries information, but its absolute position is...


Feedback Controllers - Making Hardware with Firmware. Part 7. Turbo-charged DSP Oscillators

Steve Maslen January 5, 20187 comments
This article will look at some DSP Sine-wave oscillators and will show how an FPGA with limited floating-point performance due to latency, can be persuaded to produce much higher sample-rate sine-waves of high quality. 

Comparisons will be made between implementations on Intel Cyclone V and Cyclone 10 GX FPGAs. An Intel numerically controlled oscillator


Deconvolution by least squares (Using the power of linear algebra in signal processing).

Agustin Bonelli November 12, 20152 comments

When we deal with our normal discrete signal processing operations, like FIR/IIR filtering, convolution, filter design, etc. we normally think of the signals as a constant stream of numbers that we put in a sequence


Hidden Linear Algebra in DSP

Sami Aldalahmeh June 17, 20105 comments

Linear algebra (LA) is usually thought of as a blunt theoretical subject. However, LA is found hidden in many DSP algorithms used widely in practice.

An obvious clue in finding LA in DSP is the linearity assumption used in theoretical analysis of systems for modelling or design. A standard modelling example for this case would be linear time invariant (LTI) systems. LTI are usually used to model flat wireless communication channels. LTI systems are also used in the design of digital filter...


Python number crunching faster? Part I

Christopher Felton September 17, 20114 comments

Everyone has their favorite computing platform, regardless if it is Matlab, Octave, Scilab, Mathematica, Mathcad, etc.  I have been using Python and the common numerical and scientific packages available.  Personally, I have found this to be very useful in my work.  Lately there has been some chatter on speeding up Python.

From another project I follow, MyHDL, I was introduced to the Python JIT compiler,


Modelling a Noisy Communication Signal in MATLAB for the Analog to Digital Conversion Process

Parth Vakil October 30, 200713 comments

A critical thing to realize while modeling the signal that is going to be digitally processed is the SNR. In a receiver, the noise floor (hence the noise variance and hence its power) are determined by the temperature and the Bandwidth. For a system with a constant bandwidth, relatively constant temperature, the noise power remains relatively constant as well. This implies that the noise variance is a constant.

In MATLAB, the easiest way to create a noisy signal is by using...


Feedback Controllers - Making Hardware with Firmware. Part 2. Ideal Model Examples

Steve Maslen August 24, 2017
Developing and Validating Simulation Models

This article will describe models for simulating the systems and controllers for the hardware emulation application described in Part 1 of the series.


Exponential Smoothing with a Wrinkle

Cedron Dawg December 17, 20154 comments
Introduction

This is an article to hopefully give a better understanding to the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) by providing a set of preprocessing filters to improve the resolution of the DFT. Because of the exponential nature of sinusoidal functions, they have special mathematical properties when exponential smoothing is applied to them. These properties are derived and explained in this blog article.

Basic Exponential Smoothing

Exponential smoothing is also known as...