DSPRelated.com
The 2025 DSP Online Conference

The Most Interesting FIR Filter Equation in the World: Why FIR Filters Can Be Linear Phase

Rick Lyons August 18, 201517 comments

This blog discusses a little-known filter characteristic that enables real- and complex-coefficient tapped-delay line FIR filters to exhibit linear phase behavior. That is, this blog answers the question:

What is the constraint on real- and complex-valued FIR filters that guarantee linear phase behavior in the frequency domain?

I'll declare two things to convince you to continue reading.

Declaration# 1: "That the coefficients must be symmetrical" is not a correct


Four Ways to Compute an Inverse FFT Using the Forward FFT Algorithm

Rick Lyons July 7, 20155 comments

If you need to compute inverse fast Fourier transforms (inverse FFTs) but you only have forward FFT software (or forward FFT FPGA cores) available to you, below are four ways to solve your problem.

Preliminaries To define what we're thinking about here, an N-point forward FFT and an N-point inverse FFT are described by:

$$ Forward \ FFT \rightarrow X(m) = \sum_{n=0}^{N-1} x(n)e^{-j2\pi nm/N} \tag{1} $$ $$ Inverse \ FFT \rightarrow x(n) = {1 \over N} \sum_{m=0}^{N-1}...

Correcting an Important Goertzel Filter Misconception

Rick Lyons July 6, 201517 comments

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...

Fitting a Damped Sine Wave

Detlef Amberg July 3, 20155 comments

A damped sine wave is described by

$$ x_{(k)} = A \cdot e^{\alpha \cdot k} \cdot cos(\omega \cdot k + p)\tag{1}$$

with frequency $\omega$ , phase p , initial amplitude A and damping constant $\alpha$ . The $x_{(k)}$ are the samples of the function at equally spaced points in time.

With $x_{(k)}$ given, one often has to find the unknown parameters of the function. This can be achieved for instance with nonlinear approximation or with DFT – methods.

I present a method to find the...


Premium Forum?

Stephane Boucher May 25, 201514 comments

Chances are that by now, you have had a chance to browse the new design of the *related site that I published several weeks ago.  I have been working for several months on this and I must admit that I am very happy with the results.  This new design will serve as a base for many new exciting developments. I would love to hear your comments/suggestions if you have any, please use the comments system at the bottom of this page.

First on my list would be to build and launch a new forum...


Phase and Amplitude Calculation for a Pure Real Tone in a DFT: Method 1

Cedron Dawg May 21, 20151 comment
Introduction

This is an article to hopefully give a better understanding of the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) by deriving exact formulas for the phase and amplitude of a non-integer frequency real tone in a DFT. The linearity of the Fourier Transform is exploited to reframe the problem as the equivalent of finding a set of coordinates in a specific vector space. The found coordinates are then used to calculate the phase and amplitude of the pure real tone in the DFT. This article...


Handy Online Simulation Tool Models Aliasing With Lowpass and Bandpass Sampling

Rick Lyons May 4, 20151 comment

Analog Devices Inc. has posted a neat software simulation tool on their corporate web site that graphically shows the aliasing effects of both lowpass and bandpass periodic sampling. This is a nice tutorial tool for beginners in DSP.

The tool shows four important characteristics of periodic sampling:

  Characteristic# 1: All input analog spectral components, regardless of their center frequencies, show up (appear) below half the sample rate in the digitized...

Ten Little Algorithms, Part 2: The Single-Pole Low-Pass Filter

Jason Sachs April 27, 201517 comments

Other articles in this series:

I’m writing this article in a room with a bunch of other people talking, and while sometimes I wish they would just SHUT UP, it would be...


Understanding and Implementing the Sliding DFT

Eric Jacobsen April 23, 201512 comments
Introduction

In many applications the detection or processing of signals in the frequency domain offers an advantage over performing the same task in the time-domain.   Sometimes the advantage is just a simpler or more conceptually straightforward algorithm, and often the largest barrier to working in the frequency domain is the complexity or latency involved in the Fast Fourier Transform computation.   If the frequency-domain data must be updated frequently in a...


Exact Frequency Formula for a Pure Real Tone in a DFT

Cedron Dawg April 20, 20152 comments
Introduction

This is an article to hopefully give a better understanding of the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) by deriving an exact formula for the frequency of a real tone in a DFT. According to current teaching, this is not possible, so this article should be considered a major theoretical advance in the discipline. The formula is presented in a few different formats. Some sample calculations are provided to give a numerical demonstration of the formula in use. This article is...


Add the Hilbert Transformer to Your DSP Toolkit, Part 2

Neil Robertson December 4, 20223 comments

In this part, I’ll show how to design a Hilbert Transformer using the coefficients of a half-band filter as a starting point, which turns out to be remarkably simple.  I’ll also show how a half-band filter can be synthesized using the Matlab function firpm, which employs the Parks-McClellan algorithm.

A half-band filter is a type of lowpass, even-symmetric FIR filter having an odd number of taps, with the even-numbered taps (except for the main tap) equal to zero.  This...


scipy.signal calling all developers

Christopher Felton January 19, 20122 comments

There has been some chatter on the scipy-dev mailing list lately about enhancing the scipy.signal package.  Unfortunately, there seems to be a split.  Some are going off and starting a new package scikit-signal.  The original developer, Travis Oliphant, appears to have strong interest in seeing the scipy.signal evovle.  If you are interested in signal processing you should check out the mailing lists (


Handy Online Simulation Tool Models Aliasing With Lowpass and Bandpass Sampling

Rick Lyons May 4, 20151 comment

Analog Devices Inc. has posted a neat software simulation tool on their corporate web site that graphically shows the aliasing effects of both lowpass and bandpass periodic sampling. This is a nice tutorial tool for beginners in DSP.

The tool shows four important characteristics of periodic sampling:

  Characteristic# 1: All input analog spectral components, regardless of their center frequencies, show up (appear) below half the sample rate in the digitized...

Feedback Controllers - Making Hardware with Firmware. Part 8. Control Loop Test-bed

Steve Maslen March 21, 2018

This part in the series will consider the signals, measurements, analyses and configurations for testing high-speed low-latency feedback loops and their controllers. Along with basic test signals, a versatile IFFT signal generation scheme will be discussed and implemented. A simple controller under test will be constructed to demonstrate the analysis principles in preparation for the design and evaluation of specific controllers and closed-loop applications.

Additional design...

A Useful Source of Signal Processing Information

Rick Lyons March 23, 20168 comments

I just discovered a useful web-based source of signal processing information that was new to me. I thought I'd share what I learned with the subscribers here on DSPRelated.com.

The Home page of the web site that I found doesn't look at all like it would be useful to us DSP fanatics. But if you enter some signal processing topic of interest, say, "FM demodulation" (without the quotation marks) into the 'Search' box at the top of the web page

and click the red 'SEARCH...


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,


Bayes meets Fourier

Allen Downey October 26, 2015

Joseph Fourier never met Thomas Bayes—Fourier was born in 1768, seven years after Bayes died.  But recently I have been exploring connections between the Bayes filter and the Fourier transform.

By "Bayes filter", I don't mean spam filtering using a Bayesian classifier, but rather recursive Bayesian estimation, which is used in robotics and other domains to estimate the state of a system that evolves over time, for example, the position of a moving robot.  My interest in...


Make Hardware Great Again

Jeff Brower June 29, 20205 comments

By now you're aware of the collective angst in the US about 5G. Why is the US not a leader in 5G ? Could that also happen -- indeed, is it happening -- in AI ? If we lead in other areas, why not 5G ? What makes it so hard ?

This hand-wringing has reached the highest levels in US government. Recently the Wall Street Journal reported on a DoJ promoted plan 1 to help Cisco buy Ericsson or Nokia, to give the US a leg up in 5G. This is not a new plan,...


Implementing Simultaneous Digital Differentiation, Hilbert Transformation, and Half-Band Filtering

Rick Lyons November 24, 20152 comments

Recently I've been thinking about digital differentiator and Hilbert transformer implementations and I've developed a processing scheme that may be of interest to the readers here on dsprelated.com.


The Risk In Using Frequency Domain Curves To Evaluate Digital Integrator Performance

Rick Lyons September 24, 201933 comments

This blog shows the danger in evaluating the performance of a digital integration network based solely on its frequency response curve. If you plan on implementing a digital integrator in your signal processing work I recommend you continue reading this blog.

Background

Typically when DSP practitioners want to predict the accuracy performance of a digital integrator they compare how closely that integrator's frequency response matches the frequency response of an ideal integrator [1,2]....


The 2025 DSP Online Conference