Category: DSP

Digital Signal Processing

Feedback AGC block diagram
DSP / Wireless and SDR

How Automatic Gain Control (AGC) Works

Alfred North Whitehead said, "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them." In today’s world, it is easy to take no notice of the level of process automation integrated into our lives. To have an idea of how things were in the early days, signal processing technology to sort out the radar picture on a map was not available and only a dot or a line could be generated on the screen representing a detected target. A radar operator had to stare at a screen for their whole shift to raise

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Wideband differentiator frequency and impulse responses
DSP

Design of a Discrete-Time Differentiator

Many signal processing algorithms require computation of the derivative of a signal in real-time. Some of the examples are timing recovery, carrier frequency synchronization, FM demodulation and demodulation of LoRa signals. An analog or digital filter that computes such a derivative is known as a differentiator. Before we design such a discrete-time differentiating filter, let us review some of the fundamentals. A Derivative The following quote is attributed to Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher, from 535 BC. Change is the only constant in life. This was brought into the realm of science by Newton and Leibniz. The purpose of science is

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Comparison of a binary quantized image with its dithered version
DSP

Noise is Not Always the Enemy

Noise is usually considered the main enemy in all DSP applications. As David Tse once said: “Noise is the reason for our existence (communication engineers)!” This short article briefly describes why noise sometimes plays a positive role, e.g., in the context of analog-to-digital conversion when the signal is very weak. Introduction Noise is the enemy to be conquered, particularly in communications and radar systems. In a noise-limited regime, we hit a performance brick wall due to the presence of noise. Think of parameter estimation in which the primary criteria is to establish a certain performance against a target signal-to-noise ratio.

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Low pulse width and higher resolution
DSP / Wireless and SDR

The Power of Pulse Compression

Human eyes can only see in the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Radar (Radio Detection and Ranging) is a device that extends our ability to detect the environment far beyond what is allowed by the visual nervous system, see the article on Frequency Modulated Continuous-Wave (FMCW) radars. Today we talk about the idea of pulse compression and the role it plays in target detection. As opposed to a Continuous-Wave (CW) radar, a pulsed radar transmits a short burst of energy followed by a period of silence during which it listens for the echo received from the target. As shown

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DDS waveform and spectrum after dithering
DSP / Wireless and SDR

Direct Digital Synthesizer (DDS)

A Direct Digital Synthesizer (DDS) is an integral part of all modern communication systems. It is a technique to produce a desired waveform, usually a sinusoid, through employing digital signal processing algorithms. As an example, in the transmitter (Tx) of a digital communication system, a Local Oscillator (LO) is required to generate a carrier sinusoid that upconverts the modulated signal to its allocated frequency in the spectrum. On the receive (Rx) side, another local oscillator downconverts this high frequency signal to baseband for further processing. Such a process is shown in the Tx and Rx block diagrams of a Quadrature

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