If the impulse response of a system is of finite length, then the system is said to be a Finite Impulse

Response (FIR) system (or FIR filter). Equivalently, an FIR system is a system in which the value of the
output signal at any time depends only on the values of the input signal at a finite number of time
instants.

Finite Impulse Response Filters

Finite impulse response (FIR) filters are characterized by the fact that they use only delayed
versions of the input signal to filter the input to the output. For example, if we take the
expression for a general FIR filter below, we can see that the output is a function of a series of
delayed, scaled versions of the input:

where A  is the scale factor for the ith delayed version of the input. We can represent this
i

graphically in the diagram shown in Figure 9.7. We can implement this model using the basic
building blocks described in this chapter of gain, division, sums and delays to develop block
based models for such filters. As noted in the previous section, it is important to ensure that for
higher accuracy filters, fixed or floating point arithmetic is required and also the use of
multipliers for added accuracy is preferable in most cases to that of simple gain and division
blocks as described previously in this chapter.

FIR Digital Filters

Finite impulse response (FIR) filters are
nonrecursive filters: The output depends only on a
history of input values. A simple example of an FIR
filter is the moving-average filter of order M:

Moving-average filters are among the most intuitive filters; in fact, they are commonly used to smooth
data by people who otherwise do not employ filters. The z-transform of the moving-average filter is

Some controls engineers have used moving-average filters but are unfamiliar with their characterization in
the z-domain. In fact, these filters can be analyzed in the frequency domain just like an IIR filter.
The general form of an FIR is similar to that of the moving-average filter except that the coefficients of the
delayed input terms can vary. These terms were fixed at 1/(M + 1) in Equation 9.15. Equation 9.16 shows
the general FIR. Any IIR filter can be approximated by an FIR filter, assuming enough delayed terms of
the input are available.

The key advantage of FIRs is their ability to represent high-order filters with only modest sensitivity to
coefficient quantization and without creating limit cycles [Section 5.9.1]. This makes the FIR filters ideal
for communications applications, such as telephony applications, where the sharp roll-off characteristics
of high-order filters are required.