Generating pink noise
In one of his most famous columns for Scientific American, Martin Gardner wrote about pink noise and its relation to fractal music. The article was based on a 1978 paper by Voss and Clarke, which presents, among other things, a simple...
Exponential Smoothing with a Wrinkle
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...
Margin Call: Fermi Problems, Highway Horrors, Black Swans, and Why You Should Worry About When You Should Worry
Discrete-Time PLLs, Part 1: Basics
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.
Analytic Signal
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.
Blogging Tutorial
This article will be updated on a regular basis based on your questions and feedback. Creating a new blog post Make sure your are logged in Click on 'Create new blog post' Although the online editor works pretty well and...
Four Ways to Compute an Inverse FFT Using the Forward FFT Algorithm
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...
Handy Online Simulation Tool Models Aliasing With Lowpass and Bandpass Sampling
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...
Ten Little Algorithms, Part 2: The Single-Pole Low-Pass Filter
Other articles in this series: Part 1: Russian Peasant Multiplication Part 2: The Single-Pole Low-Pass Filter Part 3: Welford’s Method (And Friends) Part 4: Topological Sort I’m writing this article in a room with a bunch of...
Understanding and Implementing the Sliding DFT
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...
Discrete Wavelet Transform Filter Bank Implementation (part 2)
Following the previous blog entry: http://www.dsprelated.com/showarticle/115.php Difference between DWT and DWPT Before getting to the equivalent filter obtention, I first want to talk about the difference between DWT(Discrete Wavelet...
Free DSP Books on the Internet
While surfing the "net" I have occasionally encountered signal processing books whose chapters could be downloaded to my computer. I started keeping a list of those books and, over the years, that list has grown to over forty books. Perhaps the...
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...
Using Mason's Rule to Analyze DSP Networks
There have been times when I wanted to determine the z-domain transfer function of some discrete network, but my algebra skills failed me. Some time ago I learned Mason's Rule, which helped me solve my problems. If you're willing to learn the...
Somewhat Off Topic: Deciphering Transistor Terminology
I recently learned something mildly interesting about transistors, so I thought I'd share my new knowledge with you folks. Figure 1 shows a p-n-p transistor comprising a small block of n-type semiconductor sandwiched between two blocks of p-type...
The correct answer to the quiz of @apolin
The correct answer to the @apolin quiz can be easily explained using the following Simulink model: In MATLAB you have to initialize the two filters: h = dftmtx (8); h1 = h (3, :); % The filter of the quiz h2 = h (7, :); % The...
Add a Power Marker to a Power Spectral Density (PSD) Plot
Perhaps we should call most Power Spectral Density (PSD) calculations relative PSD, because usually we don’t have to worry about absolute power levels. However, for cases (e.g., measurements or simulations) where we are concerned with...
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...
How to Find a Fast Floating-Point atan2 Approximation
Context Over a short period of time, I came across nearly identical approximations of the two parameter arctangent function, atan2, developed by different companies, in different countries, and even in different decades. Fascinated...
Understanding and Preventing Overflow (I Had Too Much to Add Last Night)
Happy Thanksgiving! Maybe the memory of eating too much turkey is fresh in your mind. If so, this would be a good time to talk about overflow. In the world of floating-point arithmetic, overflow is possible but not particularly common. You can...
