Project update-1 : Digital Filter Blocks in MyHDL and their integration in pyFDA
This blog post presents the progress made up to week 5 in my GSoC project “Digital Filter blocks and their integration in PyFDA”. Progress was made in two areas of the project.
This post will primarily discuss filter block implementation. The interface will be discussed in a later post once further progress is made.
Direct form-I FIR filterThe equation specifies the direct form I...
Linear Feedback Shift Registers for the Uninitiated, Part XVI: Reed-Solomon Error Correction
Last time, we talked about error correction and detection, covering some basics like Hamming distance, CRCs, and Hamming codes. If you are new to this topic, I would strongly suggest going back to read that article before this one.
This time we are going to cover Reed-Solomon codes. (I had meant to cover this topic in Part XV, but the article was getting to be too long, so I’ve split it roughly in half.) These are one of the workhorses of error-correction, and they are used in...
Linear Feedback Shift Registers for the Uninitiated, Part XV: Error Detection and Correction
Last time, we talked about Gold codes, a specially-constructed set of pseudorandom bit sequences (PRBS) with low mutual cross-correlation, which are used in many spread-spectrum communications systems, including the Global Positioning System.
This time we are wading into the field of error detection and correction, in particular CRCs and Hamming codes.
Ernie, You Have a Banana in Your EarI have had a really really tough time writing this article. I like the...
Who else is going to Sensors Expo in San Jose? Looking for roommate(s)!
This will be my first time attending this show and I must say that I am excited. I am bringing with me my cameras and other video equipment with the intention to capture as much footage as possible and produce a (hopefully) fun to watch 'highlights' video. I will also try to film as many demos as possible and share them with you.
I enjoy going to shows like this one as it gives me the opportunity to get out of my home-office (from where I manage and run the *Related sites) and actually...
Digital PLL’s, Part 3 – Phase Lock an NCO to an External Clock
Sometimes you may need to phase-lock a numerically controlled oscillator (NCO) to an external clock that is not related to the system clocks of your ASIC or FPGA. This situation is shown in Figure 1. Assuming your system has an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) available, you can sync to the external clock using the scheme shown in Figure 2. This time-domain PLL model is similar to the one presented in Part 1 of this series on digital PLL’s [1]. In that PLL, we...
Project introduction: Digital Filter Blocks in MyHDL and their integration in pyFDA
Hi everyone! After a lot of hesitation and several failed attempts, I have finally entered the world of blogging. A little about myself : My name is Sriyash Caculo and I’m a third year undergrad student at BITS Pilani K.K. Birla Goa Campus pursuing a major in Electronics and Instrumentation engineering. Being an electronics engineer, I developed an interest in Digital Signal Processing and its implementation on hardware.
This blog-post is the first of many to come for the...
Two Easy Ways To Test Multistage CIC Decimation Filters
This blog presents two very easy ways to test the performance of multistage cascaded integrator-comb (CIC) decimation filters [1]. Anyone implementing CIC filters should take note of the following proposed CIC filter test methods.
Introduction
Figure 1 presents a multistage decimate by D CIC filter where the number of stages is S = 3. The '↓D' operation represents downsampling by integer D (discard all but every Dth sample), n is the input time index, and m is the output time index.
ADC Clock Jitter Model, Part 2 – Random Jitter
In Part 1, I presented a Matlab function to model an ADC with jitter on the sample clock, and applied it to examples with deterministic jitter. Now we’ll investigate an ADC with random clock jitter, by using a filtered or unfiltered Gaussian sequence as the jitter source. What we are calling jitter can also be called time jitter, phase jitter, or phase noise. It’s all the same phenomenon. Typically, we call it jitter when we have a time-domain representation,...
Take Control of Noise with Spectral Averaging
Most engineers have seen the moment-to-moment fluctuations that are common with instantaneous measurements of a supposedly steady spectrum. You can see these fluctuations in magnitude and phase for each frequency bin of your spectrogram. Although major variations are certainly reason for concern, recall that we don’t live in an ideal, noise-free world. After verifying the integrity of your measurement setup by checking connections, sensors, wiring, and the like, you might conclude that the...
Linear Feedback Shift Registers for the Uninitiated, Part XIV: Gold Codes
Last time we looked at some techniques using LFSR output for system identification, making use of the peculiar autocorrelation properties of pseudorandom bit sequences (PRBS) derived from an LFSR.
This time we’re going to jump back to the field of communications, to look at an invention called Gold codes and why a single maximum-length PRBS isn’t enough to save the world using spread-spectrum technology. We have to cover two little side discussions before we can get into Gold...
Time Machine, Anyone?
Abstract: Dispersive linear systems with negative group delay have caused much confusion in the past. Some claim that they violate causality, others that they are the cause of superluminal tunneling. Can we really receive messages before they are sent? This article aims at pouring oil in the fire and causing yet more confusion :-).
IntroductionIn this article we reproduce the results of a physical experiment...
Access to 50+ Sessions From the DSP Online Conference
In case you forget or didn't already know, registering for the 2023 DSP Online Conference automatically gives you 10 months of unlimited access to all sessions from previous editions of the conference. So for the price of an engineering book, you not only get access to the upcoming 2023 DSP Online Conference but also to hours upon hours of on-demand DSP gold from some of the best experts in the field.
The value you get for your small investment is simply huge. Many of the...
Linear Feedback Shift Registers for the Uninitiated, Part XIV: Gold Codes
Last time we looked at some techniques using LFSR output for system identification, making use of the peculiar autocorrelation properties of pseudorandom bit sequences (PRBS) derived from an LFSR.
This time we’re going to jump back to the field of communications, to look at an invention called Gold codes and why a single maximum-length PRBS isn’t enough to save the world using spread-spectrum technology. We have to cover two little side discussions before we can get into Gold...
Two jobs
For those of you following closely embeddedrelated and the other related sites, you might have noticed that I have been less active for the last couple of months, and I will use this blog post to explain why. The main reason is that I got myself involved into a project that ended up using a better part of my cpu than I originally thought it would.
edit - video of the event:
I currently have two jobs: one as an electrical/dsp engineer recycled as a web publisher and the other...
Linear Feedback Shift Registers for the Uninitiated, Part XV: Error Detection and Correction
Last time, we talked about Gold codes, a specially-constructed set of pseudorandom bit sequences (PRBS) with low mutual cross-correlation, which are used in many spread-spectrum communications systems, including the Global Positioning System.
This time we are wading into the field of error detection and correction, in particular CRCs and Hamming codes.
Ernie, You Have a Banana in Your EarI have had a really really tough time writing this article. I like the...
The History of CIC Filters: The Untold Story
If you have ever studied or designed a cascaded integrator-comb (CIC) lowpass filter then surely you've read Eugene Hogenauer's seminal 1981 IEEE paper where he first introduced the CIC filter to the signal processing world [1]. As it turns out, Hogenauer's famous paper was not the first formal document describing and proposing CIC filters. Here's the story.
In the Fall of 1979 Eugene Hogenauer was finalizing his development of the CIC filter, the filter now used in so many multirate signal...
The 2021 DSP Online Conference
The 2021 DSP Online Conference is just around the corner and this year again, the program is packed with opportunities for DSP engineers to refresh their DSP skills and learn a few new tricks along the way.
By registering for the conference, not only will you have full access to all talks, workshops, and Q&A sessions at this year's event, but you'll also gain instant access to all talks from last year's...
Feedback Controllers - Making Hardware with Firmware. Part 4. Engineering of Evaluation Hardware
Following on from the previous abstract descriptions of an arbitrary circuit emulation application for low-latency feedback controllers, we now come to some aspects in the hardware engineering of an evaluation design from concept to first power-up. In due course a complete specification along with application examples will be maintained on the project website.
- Part 1: Introduction
- Part 2:...
Adaptive Beamforming is like Squeezing a Water Balloon
Adaptive beamforming was first developed in the 1960s for radar and sonar applications. The main idea is that signals can be captured using multiple sensors and the sensor outputs can be combined to enhance the signals propagating from specific directions and attenuate (null out) signals from other directions. It has grown immensely in recent years as processors have become faster and cheaper. Today, adaptive beamforming applications include smart speakers (like the Amazon Echo),...
The DFT of Finite-Length Time-Reversed Sequences
Recently I've been reading papers on underwater acoustic communications systems and this caused me to investigate the frequency-domain effects of time-reversal of time-domain sequences. I created this blog because there is so little coverage of this topic in the literature of DSP.
This blog reviews the two types of time-reversal of finite-length sequences and summarizes their discrete Fourier transform (DFT) frequency-domain characteristics.The Two Types of Time-Reversal in DSP
...Went 280km/h (174mph) in a Porsche Panamera in Germany!
Those of you who've been following my blog lately already know that I am going through some sort of mid-life crisis that involves going out there to meet people and make videos. It all started with Embedded World early this year, then continued at ESC Boston a couple of months ago and the latest chapter just concluded as I returned from Germany after spending a week at SEGGER's headquarters to produce a video to highlight their 25th anniversary.
The DSP Online Conference - Right Around the Corner!
It is Sunday night as I write this blog post with a few days to go before the virtual doors of the very first DSP Online Conference open..
It all started with a post in the DSPRelated forum about three months ago. We had just had a blast running the 2020 Embedded Online Conference and we thought it could be fun to organize a smaller event dedicated to the DSP community. So my goal with the post in the forum was to see if...
Should DSP Undergraduate Students Study z-Transform Regions of Convergence?
Not long ago I presented my 3-day DSP class to a group of engineers at Tektronix Inc. in Beaverton Oregon [1]. After I finished covering my material on IIR filters' z-plane pole locations and filter stability, one of the Tektronix engineers asked a question similar to:
"I noticed that you didn't discuss z-plane regions of convergence here. In my undergraduate DSP class we spent a lot of classroom and homework time on the ...
Correcting an Important Goertzel Filter Misconception
Recently I was on the Signal Processing Stack Exchange web site (a question and answer site for DSP people) and I read a posted question regarding Goertzel filters [1]. One of the subscribers posted a reply to the question by pointing interested readers to a Wikipedia web page discussing Goertzel filters [2]. I noticed the Wiki web site stated that a Goertzel filter:
"...is marginally stable and vulnerable tonumerical error accumulation when computed usinglow-precision arithmetic and...Half-band filter on Xilinx FPGA
1. DSP48 Slice in Xilinx FPGA
There are many DSP48 Slices in most Xilinx® FPGAs, one DSP48 slice in Spartan6® FPGA is shown in Figure 1, the structure may different depending on the device, but broadly similar.
Figure 1: A whole DSP48A1 Slice in Spartan6 (www.xilinx.com)
2. Symmetric Systolic Half-band FIRFigure 2: Symmetric Systolic Half-band FIR Filter
3. Two-channel Symmetric Systolic Half-band FIRFigure 3: 2-Channel...
A Simple Complex Down-conversion Scheme
Recently I was experimenting with complex down-conversion schemes. That is, generating an analytic (complex) version, centered at zero Hz, of a real bandpass signal that was originally centered at ±fs/4 (one fourth the sample rate). I managed to obtain one such scheme that is computationally efficient, and it might be of some mild interest to you guys. The simple complex down-conversion scheme is shown in Figure 1(a).It works like this: say we have a real xR(n) input bandpass...
Canonic Signed Digit (CSD) Representation of Integers
In my last post I presented Matlab code to synthesize multiplierless FIR filters using Canonic Signed Digit (CSD) coefficients. I included a function dec2csd1.m (repeated here in Appendix A) to convert decimal integers to binary CSD values. Here I want to use that function to illustrate a few properties of CSD numbers.
In a binary signed-digit number system, we allow each binary digit to have one of the three values {0, 1, -1}. Thus, for example, the binary value 1 1...
Angle Addition Formulas from Euler's Formula
Introduction
This is an article to hopefully give a better understanding of the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT), but only indirectly. The main intent is to get someone who is uncomfortable with complex numbers a little more used to them and relate them back to already known Trigonometric relationships done in Real values. It is essentially a followup to my first blog article "The Exponential Nature of the Complex Unit Circle".
Polar CoordinatesThe more common way of...
Compute the Frequency Response of a Multistage Decimator
Figure 1a shows the block diagram of a decimation-by-8 filter, consisting of a low-pass finite impulse response (FIR) filter followed by downsampling by 8 [1]. A more efficient version is shown in Figure 1b, which uses three cascaded decimate-by-two filters. This implementation has the advantages that only FIR 1 is sampled at the highest sample rate, and the total number of filter taps is lower.
The frequency response of the single-stage decimator before downsampling is just...
Amplitude modulation and the sampling theorem
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...
