Design IIR Band-Reject Filters
In this post, I show how to design IIR Butterworth band-reject filters, and provide two Matlab functions for band-reject filter synthesis. Earlier posts covered IIR Butterworth lowpass [1] and bandpass [2] filters. Here, the function br_synth1.m designs band-reject filters based on null frequency and upper -3 dB frequency, while br_synth2.m designs them based on lower and upper -3 dB frequencies. I’ll discuss the differences between the two approaches later in this...
Design IIR Bandpass Filters
In this post, I present a method to design Butterworth IIR bandpass filters. My previous post [1] covered lowpass IIR filter design, and provided a Matlab function to design them. Here, we’ll do the same thing for IIR bandpass filters, with a Matlab function bp_synth.m. Here is an example function call for a bandpass filter based on a 3rd order lowpass prototype:
N= 3; % order of prototype LPF fcenter= 22.5; % Hz center frequency, Hz bw= 5; ...Phase and Amplitude Calculation for a Pure Complex Tone in a DFT
IntroductionThis is an article to hopefully give a better understanding of the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) by deriving exact formulas to calculate the phase and amplitude of a pure complex tone from a DFT bin value and knowing the frequency. This is a much simpler problem to solve than the corresponding case for a pure real tone which I covered in an earlier blog article[1]. In the noiseless single tone case, these equations will be exact. In the presence of noise or other tones...
Feedback Controllers - Making Hardware with Firmware. Part 7. Turbo-charged DSP Oscillators
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
Linear Feedback Shift Registers for the Uninitiated, Part XII: Spread-Spectrum Fundamentals
Last time we looked at the use of LFSRs for pseudorandom number generation, or PRNG, and saw two things:
- the use of LFSR state for PRNG has undesirable serial correlation and frequency-domain properties
- the use of single bits of LFSR output has good frequency-domain properties, and its autocorrelation values are so close to zero that they are actually better than a statistically random bit stream
The unusually-good correlation properties...
An Efficient Linear Interpolation Scheme
This blog presents a computationally-efficient linear interpolation trick that requires at most one multiply per output sample.
Background: Linear Interpolation
Looking at Figure 1(a) let's assume we have two points, [x(0),y(0)] and [x(1),y(1)], and we want to compute the value y, on the line joining those two points, associated with the value x.
Figure 1: Linear interpolation: given x, x(0), x(1), y(0), and y(1), compute the value of y. ...
An Alternative Form of the Pure Real Tone DFT Bin Value Formula
IntroductionThis is an article to hopefully give a better understanding of the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) by deriving alternative exact formulas for the bin values of a real tone in a DFT. The derivation of the source equations can be found in my earlier blog article titled "DFT Bin Value Formulas for Pure Real Tones"[1]. The new form is slighty more complicated and calculation intensive, but it is more computationally accurate in the vicinity of near integer frequencies. This...
Design IIR Butterworth Filters Using 12 Lines of Code
While there are plenty of canned functions to design Butterworth IIR filters [1], it’s instructive and not that complicated to design them from scratch. You can do it in 12 lines of Matlab code. In this article, we’ll create a Matlab function butter_synth.m to design lowpass Butterworth filters of any order. Here is an example function call for a 5th order filter:
N= 5 % Filter order fc= 10; % Hz cutoff freq fs= 100; % Hz sample freq [b,a]=...Feedback Controllers - Making Hardware with Firmware. Part 6. Self-Calibration Related.
This article will consider the engineering of a self-calibration & self-test capability to enable the project hardware to be configured and its basic performance evaluated and verified, ready for the development of the low-latency controller DSP firmware and closed-loop applications. Performance specifications will be documented in due course, on the project website here.
- Part 6: Self-Calibration, Measurements and Signalling (this part)
- Part 5:
Simplest Calculation of Half-band Filter Coefficients
Half-band filters are lowpass FIR filters with cut-off frequency of one-quarter of sampling frequency fs and odd symmetry about fs/4 [1]*. And it so happens that almost half of the coefficients are zero. The passband and stopband bandwiths are equal, making these filters useful for decimation-by-2 and interpolation-by-2. Since the zero coefficients make them computationally efficient, these filters are ubiquitous in DSP systems.
Here we will compute half-band...
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 ...
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...
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...
Simulink-Simulation of SSB demodulation
≥≥≥ Simulink-Simulation of SSB demodulation or modulation from the article “Understanding the ‘Phasing Method’ of Single Sideband Demodulation” by Richard Lyons Josef HoffmannThe article “Understanding the ‘Phasing Method’ of Single Sideband Demodulation” by Richard Lyons is a very good description of this topic. The block representation from the figures are clear and easy to understand. They are predestined for a simulation in Simulink. The simulation can help...
Sinusoidal Frequency Estimation Based on Time-Domain Samples
The topic of estimating a noise-free real or complex sinusoid's frequency, based on fast Fourier transform (FFT) samples, has been presented in recent blogs here on dsprelated.com. For completeness, it's worth knowing that simple frequency estimation algorithms exist that do not require FFTs to be performed . Below I present three frequency estimation algorithms that use time-domain samples, and illustrate a very important principle regarding so called "exact"...
Linear-phase DC Removal Filter
This blog describes several DC removal networks that might be of interest to the dsprelated.com readers.
Back in August 2007 there was a thread on the comp.dsp newsgroup concerning the process of removing the DC (zero Hz) component from a time-domain sequence [1]. Discussed in that thread was the notion of removing a signal's DC bias by subtracting the signal's moving average from that signal, as shown in Figure 1(a).
Figure 1.
At first I thought...
Helping New Bloggers to Break the Ice: A New Ipad Pro for the Author with the Best Article!
Breaking the ice can be tough. Over the years, many individuals have asked to be given access to the blogging interface only to never post an article.
The Zeroing Sine Family of Window Functions
IntroductionThis is an article to hopefully give a better understanding of the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) by introducing a class of well behaved window functions that the author believes to be previously unrecognized. The definition and some characteristics are displayed. The heavy math will come in later articles. This is an introduction to the family, and a very special member of it.
This is one of my longer articles. The bulk of the material is in the front half. The...
Reduced-Delay IIR Filters
This blog gives the results of a preliminary investigation of reduced-delay (reduced group delay) IIR filters based on my understanding of the concepts presented in a recent interesting blog by Steve Maslen [1].
Development of a Reduced-Delay 2nd-Order IIR Filter
Maslen's development of a reduced-delay 2nd-order IIR filter begins with a traditional prototype filter, HTrad, shown in Figure 1(a). The first modification to the prototype filter is to extract the b0 feedforward coefficient...
Improved Narrowband Lowpass IIR Filters
Here's a neat IIR filter trick. It's excerpted from the "DSP Tricks" chapter of the new 3rd edition of my book "Understanding Digital Signal Processing". Perhaps this trick will be of some value to the subscribers of dsprelated.com.
Due to their resistance to quantized-coefficient errors, traditional 2nd-order infinite impulse response (IIR) filters are the fundamental building blocks in computationally-efficient high-order IIR digital filter implementations. However, when used in...
Embedded World 2018 - The Interviews
Once again this year, I had the chance to go to Embedded World in Nuremberg Germany. And once again this year, I brought my video equipment to try and capture some of the most interesting things at the show.
Something new this year, I asked Jacob Beningo if he would partner with me in doing interviews with a few vendors. I would operate the camera while Jacob would ask the right questions to the vendors to make them talk about the key products/features that...
ADC Clock Jitter Model, Part 1 – Deterministic Jitter
Analog to digital converters (ADC’s) have several imperfections that affect communications signals, including thermal noise, differential nonlinearity, and sample clock jitter [1, 2]. As shown in Figure 1, the ADC has a sample/hold function that is clocked by a sample clock. Jitter on the sample clock causes the sampling instants to vary from the ideal sample time. This transfers the jitter from the sample clock to the input signal.
In this article, I present a Matlab...
Fitting a Damped Sine Wave
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...
The Swiss Army Knife of Digital Networks
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...
Do Multirate Systems Have Transfer Functions?
The following text describes why I ask the strange question in the title of this blog. Some months ago I was asked to review a article manuscript, for possible publication in a signal processing journal, that presented a method for improving the performance of cascaded integrator-comb (CIC) decimation filters [1].
Thinking about such filters, Figure 1(a) shows the block diagram of a traditional 2nd-order CIC decimation filter followed by downsampling by the sample rate factor R. There we...
Curse you, iPython Notebook!
First, I think ipython is great. I use it daily and always have an ipython terminal open. But just recently, I was showing off the ipython 0.12 notebook and in the process created a lengthy example while demonstrating the cool features of the ipython notebook. The example included LaTeX equations, plots, etc. Since the notebook session was on something of relevance I decided to clean up the session and use it for the beginning of a report.
A Narrow Bandpass Filter in Octave or Matlab
The design of a very narrow bandpass FIR filter, coded in either Octave or Matlab, can prove challenging if a computationally-efficient filter is required. This is especially true if the sampling rate is high relative to the filter's center frequency. The most obvious filter design methods, using either window-based or Remez ( Parks-McClellan ) functions, can easily result in filters with many thousands of taps.
The filter to be described reduces the computational effort (and thus...
Linear Feedback Shift Registers for the Uninitiated, Part XIII: System Identification
Last time we looked at spread-spectrum techniques using the output bit sequence of an LFSR as a pseudorandom bit sequence (PRBS). The main benefit we explored was increasing signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) relative to other disturbance signals in a communication system.
This time we’re going to use a PRBS from LFSR output to do something completely different: system identification. We’ll show two different methods of active system identification, one using sine waves and the other...
Embedded World 2018 - More Videos!
After the interview videos last week, this week I am very happy to release two more videos taken at Embedded World 2018 and that I am proud of.
For both videos, I made extensive use of my two new toys, a Zhiyun Crane Gimbal and a Sony a6300 camera.
The use of a gimbal like the Zhiyun makes a big difference in terms of making the footage look much more stable and cinematographic.
As for the Sony camera, it takes fantastic slow-motion footage and...
Online DSP Classes: Why Such a High Dropout Rate?
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...


















