DSP Archives | Page 7 of 14

Bandwidth, power and DSP correspond to the traditional trio of raw materials, energy and knowledge

Why Building an SDR Requires DSP Expertise

In an introduction to signals, we discussed the idea that the any activities around us, starting from subatomic particles to massive societal networks, are generating signals all the time. Since mathematics is the language of the universe and digital signals are nothing but quantized number sequences, it is fair to say that the workings of the universe can be mapped to an infinitely large set of signals. With these number sequences in hand, an electronic computer can process the signals and either extract the information about the surrounding real world phenomena or even better influence its target environment. We saw

Square-root Nyquist filters for three different excess bandwidths

September 16, 2017 DSP / Wireless/SDR

How to Design Nyquist and Square-Root Nyquist Pulse Shaping Filters

The radio spectrum is a very precious resource like real estate and must be utilized judiciously. Pulse shaping filters control the spectral leakage of the transmitted signal in a wireless channel due to the strict restrictions to comply with a spectral mask. This is even more important for the upcoming 5G wireless systems which are based on a variety of wireless transmission protocols (such as mobile networks, Internet of Things (IoT) and machine to machine communications) combined in one comprehensive standard. Even for wired channels, there is always a natural bandwidth of the medium (copper wire, coaxial cable, optical fiber)

A discrete-time integrator implemented through a forward difference and a backward difference technique

September 15, 2017 DSP

Discrete-Time Integrators

An integrator is a very important filter that proves useful in implementation of many blocks of a communication receiver such as symbol timing synchronization and Phase-Locked Loop (PLL). It is an inverse operation to a differentiator that is also used in many signal processing applications such as FM demodulation and image processing. In continuous-time case, an integrator finds the area under the curve of a signal amplitude. A discrete-time system deals with just the signal samples and hence a discrete-time integrator serves the purpose of collecting a running sum of past samples for an input signal. Looking at an infinitesimally

November 30, 2023 DSP / Localization

FMCW Radar Part 3 – Design Guidelines

The Bloom’s Taxonomy describes the levels of mastery one attains in a field. Its last two stages are Synthesis and Evaluation. This is where the masters can be differentiated from the experts. In a job interview, for example, a good technique to judge a candidate’s ability is to ask them where the system in question breaks. A little learning is a dangerous thing Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain And drinking largely sobers us again While the first two parts of the FMCW radar series addressed the lower levels, Part 3 is

May 9, 2017 DSP

Moving Average Filter

The most commonly used filter in DSP applications is a moving average filter. In today’s world with extremely fast clock speeds of the microprocessors, it seems strange that an application would require simple operations. But that is exactly the case with most applications in embedded systems that run on limited battery power and consequently host small microcontrollers. For noise reduction, it can be implemented with a few adders and delay elements. For lowpass filtering, the excellent frequency domain response and substantial suppression of stopband sidelobes are less important than having a basic filtering functionality, which is where a moving average