DSPRelated.com

The Real Star of Star Trek

Rick Lyons September 25, 20168 comments

Unless you've been living under a rock recently, you're probably aware that this month is the 50-year anniversary of the original Star Trek show on American television. It's an anniversary worth noting, as did Time and Newsweek magazines with their special editions.

   

Over the years I've come to realize that a major star of the original Star Trek series wasn't an actor. It was a thing. The starship USS Enterprise! Before I explain my thinking, here's a little...


An s-Plane to z-Plane Mapping Example

Rick Lyons September 24, 201610 comments

While surfing around the Internet recently I encountered the 's-plane to z-plane mapping' diagram shown in Figure 1. At first I thought the diagram was neat because it's a good example of the old English idiom: "A picture is worth a thousand words." However, as I continued to look at Figure 1 I began to detect what I believe are errors in the diagram.

Reader, please take a few moments to see if you detect any errors in Figure 1.

...

Should DSP Undergraduate Students Study z-Transform Regions of Convergence?

Rick Lyons September 14, 201613 comments

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  ...


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...


An Astounding Digital Filter Design Application

Rick Lyons July 7, 201613 comments

I've recently encountered a digital filter design application that astonished me with its design flexibility, capability, and ease of use. The software is called the "ASN Filter Designer." After experimenting with a demo version of this filter design software I was so impressed that I simply had publicize it to the subscribers here on dsprelated.com.

What I Liked About the ASN Filter Designer

With typical filter design software packages the user enters numerical values for the...


The Swiss Army Knife of Digital Networks

Rick Lyons June 13, 20168 comments

This blog describes a general discrete-signal network that appears, in various forms, inside so many DSP applications. 

Figure 1 shows how the network's structure has the distinct look of a digital filter—a comb filter followed by a 2nd-order recursive network. However, I do not call this useful network a filter because its capabilities extend far beyond simple filtering. Through a series of examples I've illustrated the fundamental strength of this Swiss Army Knife of digital networks...


Digital Envelope Detection: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Rick Lyons April 3, 201621 comments

Recently I've been thinking about the process of envelope detection. Tutorial information on this topic is readily available but that information is spread out over a number of DSP textbooks and many Internet web sites. The purpose of this blog is to summarize various digital envelope detection methods in one place.

Here I focus on envelope detection as it is applied to an amplitude-fluctuating sinusoidal signal where the positive-amplitude fluctuations (the sinusoid's envelope)...


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...


Optimizing the Half-band Filters in Multistage Decimation and Interpolation

Rick Lyons January 4, 201616 comments

This blog discusses a not so well-known rule regarding the filtering in multistage decimation and interpolation by an integer power of two. I'm referring to sample rate change systems using half-band lowpass filters (LPFs) as shown in Figure 1. Here's the story.

Figure 1: Multistage decimation and interpolation using half-band filters.

Multistage Decimation – A Very Brief Review

Figure 2(a) depicts the process of decimation by an integer factor D. That...


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.


Why Time-Domain Zero Stuffing Produces Multiple Frequency-Domain Spectral Images

Rick Lyons March 23, 20154 comments

This blog explains why, in the process of time-domain interpolation (sample rate increase), zero stuffing a time sequence with zero-valued samples produces an increased-length time sequence whose spectrum contains replications of the original time sequence's spectrum.

Background

The traditional way to interpolate (sample rate increase) an x(n) time domain sequence is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1

The '↑ L' operation in Figure 1 means to...


An Astounding Digital Filter Design Application

Rick Lyons July 7, 201613 comments

I've recently encountered a digital filter design application that astonished me with its design flexibility, capability, and ease of use. The software is called the "ASN Filter Designer." After experimenting with a demo version of this filter design software I was so impressed that I simply had publicize it to the subscribers here on dsprelated.com.

What I Liked About the ASN Filter Designer

With typical filter design software packages the user enters numerical values for the...


Should DSP Undergraduate Students Study z-Transform Regions of Convergence?

Rick Lyons September 14, 201613 comments

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

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...

A Simple Complex Down-conversion Scheme

Rick Lyons January 21, 20087 comments
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...


Frequency Translation by Way of Lowpass FIR Filtering

Rick Lyons February 4, 20175 comments

Some weeks ago a question appeared on the dsp.related Forum regarding the notion of translating a signal down in frequency and lowpass filtering in a single operation [1]. It is possible to implement such a process by embedding a discrete cosine sequence's values within the coefficients of a traditional lowpass FIR filter. I first learned about this process from Reference [2]. Here's the story.

Traditional Frequency Translation Prior To Filtering

Think about the process shown in...


The Swiss Army Knife of Digital Networks

Rick Lyons June 13, 20168 comments

This blog describes a general discrete-signal network that appears, in various forms, inside so many DSP applications. 

Figure 1 shows how the network's structure has the distinct look of a digital filter—a comb filter followed by a 2nd-order recursive network. However, I do not call this useful network a filter because its capabilities extend far beyond simple filtering. Through a series of examples I've illustrated the fundamental strength of this Swiss Army Knife of digital networks...


Online DSP Classes: Why Such a High Dropout Rate?

Rick Lyons October 7, 201718 comments

Last year the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine published a lengthy article describing three university-sponsored online digital signal processing (DSP) courses [1]. The article detailed all the effort the professors expended in creating those courses and the courses' perceived values to students. 

However, one fact that struck me as important, but not thoroughly addressed in the article, was the shocking dropout rate of those online courses. For two of the courses the article's...


Coupled-Form 2nd-Order IIR Resonators: A Contradiction Resolved

Rick Lyons November 23, 20127 comments

This blog clarifies how to obtain and interpret the z-domain transfer function of the coupled-form 2nd-order IIR resonator. The coupled-form 2nd-order IIR resonator was developed to overcome a shortcoming in the standard 2nd-order IIR resonator. With that thought in mind, let's take a brief look at a standard 2nd-order IIR resonator.

Standard 2nd-Order IIR Resonator A block diagram of the standard 2nd-order IIR resonator is shown in Figure 1(a). You've probably seen that block diagram many...


Is It True That j is Equal to the Square Root of -1 ?

Rick Lyons September 16, 20136 comments

A few days ago, on the YouTube.com web site, I watched an interesting video concerning complex numbers and the j operator. The video's author claimed that the statement "j is equal to the square root of negative one" is incorrect. What he said was:

He justified his claim by going through the following exercise, starting with:

Based on the algebraic identity:

the author rewrites Eq. (1) as:

If we assume

Eq. (3) can be rewritten...