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The Little Fruit Market: The Beginning of the Digital Explosion

Rick Lyons January 14, 20135 comments

There used to be a fruit market located at 391 San Antonio Road in Mountain View, California. In the 1990's I worked part time in Mountain View and drove past this market's building, shown in Figure 1, many times, unaware of its history. What happened at that fruit market has changed the lives of almost everyone on our planet. Here's the story.

William Shockley In 1948 the brilliant physicist William Shockley, along with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, co-invented the transistor at Bell...


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...


Setting the 3-dB Cutoff Frequency of an Exponential Averager

Rick Lyons October 22, 20126 comments

This blog discusses two ways to determine an exponential averager's weighting factor so that the averager has a given 3-dB cutoff frequency. Here we assume the reader is familiar with exponential averaging lowpass filters, also called a "leaky integrators", to reduce noise fluctuations that contaminate constant-amplitude signal measurements. Exponential averagers are useful because they allow us to implement lowpass filtering at a low computational workload per output sample.

Figure 1 shows...


Understanding the 'Phasing Method' of Single Sideband Demodulation

Rick Lyons August 8, 201230 comments

There are four ways to demodulate a transmitted single sideband (SSB) signal. Those four methods are:

  • synchronous detection,
  • phasing method,
  • Weaver method, and
  • filtering method.

Here we review synchronous detection in preparation for explaining, in detail, how the phasing method works. This blog contains lots of preliminary information, so if you're already familiar with SSB signals you might want to scroll down to the 'SSB DEMODULATION BY SYNCHRONOUS DETECTION'...


How Discrete Signal Interpolation Improves D/A Conversion

Rick Lyons May 28, 20121 comment
This blog post is also available in pdf format. Download here.

Earlier this year, for the Linear Audio magazine, published in the Netherlands whose subscribers are technically-skilled hi-fi audio enthusiasts, I wrote an article on the fundamentals of interpolation as it's used to improve the performance of analog-to-digital conversion. Perhaps that article will be of some value to the subscribers of dsprelated.com. Here's what I wrote:

We encounter the process of digital-to-analog...


How Not to Reduce DFT Leakage

Rick Lyons May 23, 201211 comments

This blog describes a technique to reduce the effects of spectral leakage when using the discrete Fourier transform (DFT).

In late April 2012 there was a thread on the comp.dsp newsgroup discussing ways to reduce the spectral leakage problem encountered when using the DFT. One post in that thread caught my eye [1]. That post referred to a website presenting a paper describing a DFT leakage method that I'd never heard of before [2]. (Of course, not that I've heard...


The History of CIC Filters: The Untold Story

Rick Lyons February 20, 20126 comments

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...


Accurate Measurement of a Sinusoid's Peak Amplitude Based on FFT Data

Rick Lyons December 14, 201112 comments

There are two code snippets associated with this blog post:

Flat-Top Windowing Function for the Accurate Measurement of a Sinusoid's Peak Amplitude Based on FFT Data

and

Testing the Flat-Top Windowing Function

This blog discusses an accurate method of estimating time-domain sinewave peak amplitudes based on fast Fourier transform (FFT) data. Such an operation sounds simple, but the scalloping loss characteristic of FFTs complicates the process. We eliminate that complication by...


Generating Complex Baseband and Analytic Bandpass Signals

Rick Lyons November 2, 20112 comments

There are so many different time- and frequency-domain methods for generating complex baseband and analytic bandpass signals that I had trouble keeping those techniques straight in my mind. Thus, for my own benefit, I created a kind of reference table showing those methods. I present that table for your viewing pleasure in this blog.

For clarity, I define a complex baseband signal as follows: derived from an input analog xbp(t)bandpass signal whose spectrum is shown in Figure 1(a), or...


Orfanidis Textbooks are Available Online

Rick Lyons July 12, 2011

I have just learned that Sophocles J. Orfanidis, the well-known professor with the ECE Department of Rutgers University, has made two of his signal processing textbooks available for downloading on the Internet. The first textbook is: "Introduction to Signal Processing" available at: http://eceweb1.rutgers.edu/~orfanidi/intro2sp/

Happily, also available at the above web site are:

  • Errata for the textbook.
  • Homework Solutions Manual
  • Errata for Solutions...

Above-Average Smoothing of Impulsive Noise

Rick Lyons July 10, 201724 comments

In this blog I show a neat noise reduction scheme that has the high-frequency noise reduction behavior of a traditional moving average process but with much better impulsive-noise suppression.

In practice we may be required to make precise measurements in the presence of highly-impulsive noise. Without some sort of analog signal conditioning, or digital signal processing, it can be difficult to obtain stable and repeatable, measurements. This impulsive-noise smoothing trick,...


Orfanidis Textbooks are Available Online

Rick Lyons July 12, 2011

I have just learned that Sophocles J. Orfanidis, the well-known professor with the ECE Department of Rutgers University, has made two of his signal processing textbooks available for downloading on the Internet. The first textbook is: "Introduction to Signal Processing" available at: http://eceweb1.rutgers.edu/~orfanidi/intro2sp/

Happily, also available at the above web site are:

  • Errata for the textbook.
  • Homework Solutions Manual
  • Errata for Solutions...

A Remarkable Bit of DFT Trivia

Rick Lyons December 26, 20133 comments

I recently noticed a rather peculiar example of discrete Fourier transform (DFT) trivia; an unexpected coincidence regarding the scalloping loss of the DFT. Here's the story.

DFT SCALLOPING LOSS As you know, if we perform an N-point DFT on N real-valued time-domain samples of a discrete sine wave, whose frequency is an integer multiple of fs/N (fs is the sample rate in Hz), the peak magnitude of the sine wave's positive-frequency spectral component will be

where A is the peak amplitude...


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...


A Fast Guaranteed-Stable Sliding DFT Algorithm

Rick Lyons June 15, 202335 comments

This blog presents a most computationally-efficient guaranteed-stable real-time sliding discrete Fourier transform (SDFT) algorithm. The phrase “real-time” means the network computes one spectral output sample, equal to a single-bin output of an N‑point discrete Fourier transform (DFT), for each input signal sample.

Proposed Guaranteed Stable SDFT

My proposed guaranteed stable SDFT, whose development is given in [1], is shown in Figure 1(a). The output sequence Xk(n) is an N-point...


Somewhat Off Topic: Deciphering Transistor Terminology

Rick Lyons May 28, 20194 comments

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 semiconductor.

The terminology of "emitter" and "collector" seems appropriate, but did you ever wonder why the semiconductor block in the center is called the "base"? The word base seems inappropriate because the definition of the word base is:...


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...

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...


A DSP Quiz Question

Rick Lyons December 5, 202112 comments

Here's a DSP Quiz Question that I hope you find mildly interesting

BACKGROUND

Due to the periodic natures an N-point discrete Fourier transform (DFT) sequence and that sequence’s inverse DFT, it is occasionally reasonable to graphically plot either of those sequences as a 3-dimensional (3D) circular plot. For example, Figure 1(a) shows a length-32 x(n) sequence with its 3D circular plot given in Figure 1(b).

HERE'S THE QUIZ QUESTION:

I was reading a paper by an audio DSP engineer where the...

Reducing IIR Filter Computational Workload

Rick Lyons May 24, 20195 comments

This blog describes a straightforward method to significantly reduce the number of necessary multiplies per input sample of traditional IIR lowpass and highpass digital filters.

Reducing IIR Filter Computations Using Dual-Path Allpass Filters

We can improve the computational speed of a lowpass or highpass IIR filter by converting that filter into a dual-path filter consisting of allpass filters as shown in Figure 1.

...