Received January 2, 2018, accepted April 12, 2018, date of publication April 19, 2018, date of current version

May 16, 2018.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2828405

A Design of Two Sub-Stage Square-Root

Nyquist Matched Filter
RUWU XIAO 1, QIYING LEI1 , XUAN GUO1 , WEITAO DU2 , AND YUPING ZHAO1
1 EECS,Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
2 ECDAV, Communication University of China, Beijing 100024, China

Corresponding author: Ruwu Xiao (wgdjm@pku.edu.cn)

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61371072 and in part by the National
Science and Technology Major Project under Project 2017ZX03001002.

ABSTRACT A pair of matched filters whose cascade response satisfies the Nyquist criterion can guarantee
the inter-symbol interference (ISI)-free transmission for band-limited communication systems. For a linear
phase finite impulse response square root Nyquist filter, it is necessary to strike a balance between the
stop-band attenuation (SBA) and ISI performance. This paper proposes a novel approach for obtaining
the square root Nyquist filter by adopting two sub-stage cascade filters group, which is known as the
compensated half-band (HB) filter group (CHFG). The first sub-stage of the CHFG is a HB filter which
can guarantee the required SBA performance on low computational complexity; whereas, the second sub-
stage is an ISI compensation filter to ensure that the cascaded response of two CHFGs satisfies the Nyquist
criterion. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the proposed CHFG can either achieve
better SBA/ISI performance or reduce the computational complexity.

INDEX TERMS Pulse shaping methods, computational complexity, inter-symbol interference, digital filters,
finite impulse response filter, square-root Nyquist filter.

I. INTRODUCTION Extracting the square-root of a Nyquist filter is the most

The square-root Nyquist filter is an essential part for band-
limited transmission [1]. In general, it is a pair of matched
filters whose cascade response satisfies the Nyquist criterion.
When designing the square-root Nyquist filters, some impor-
tant issues must also be considered. For example, the stop-
band attenuation (SBA) should be large enough to avoid
adjacent channel interference, the residual inter-symbol inter-
ference (ISI) should be small enough to satisfy the signal-to-
noise ratio (SNR) requirement, the interpolation/decimation
should also be done efficiently, the computational complexity
should be as low as possible by reducing the number of the
multipliers used for implementing the filter.
The square-root Nyquist filter has been deeply researched
over the past decades, and it is widely adopted in the single
carrier transmission and some multi-carrier systems [2]–[5].
The new application scenario requires the designer to bal-
ance the performance of the filter under given metrics. For
example, the method proposed in [6] is able to strike a
balance between the SBA performance and the immunity
against timing jitter under the prescribed ISI. Besides, for
some systems, such as the Internet of Things, it is required
to achieve permitted ISI and given SBA performance while
the number of multipliers used should be as less as possible.
common approach to obtain the square-root Nyquist filter.
The widely used square-root raised cosine (SRRC) filter is
such a filter which is factored from the raised cosine fil-
ter [1]. Plenty of the improved Nyquist filters also adopt
this method to acquire the corresponding square-root Nyquist
filters [7]–[9]. However, this method significantly increases
the computational complexity because of the increased num-
ber of the non-zero coefficients. Besides, various other issues
are introduced by this method, such as being more sensitive
to truncation [8].
To simplify the implementation of the square-root Nyquist
filter, a method for obtaining the square-root Nyquist filter
directly for some limited specific filter order was presented
in [10]. Besides, as summarized in the study of [11], there are
other aspects which must be considered while designing the
square-root Nyquist filter, such as immunity against timing
jitter or reducing the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of
the pulse-shaped signal. Hence, some multi-objective opti-
mization methods were introduced to solve the problem of
designing the square-root Nyquist filter. An iterative algo-
rithm based method for designing the square-root Nyquist
filters was proposed in [11], which not only decreases the
computational complexity significantly but also strikes a

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R. Xiao et al.: Design of Two Sub-Stage Square-Root Nyquist Matched Filter
balance between different design parameters. Hence, com-
pared with other known square-root Nyquist filters, the filters
proposed in [11] and [10] are one of the most efficient square-
root Nyquist filters of low computational complexity.
On the other hand, with half of its coefficients being zero,
the half-band (HB) filter is not only a widely used efficient
interpolation/decimation filter [12]–[14] but also a preferred
filter for achieving high SBA with low computational com-
plexity [15], [16]. However, two cascade HB filters do not
satisfy the Nyquist criterion, thus, the HB filter is not the
square-root Nyquist filter. Hence, in this paper, a compen-
sation (CP) filter is adopted to modify the response of the HB
filter, which would enable the cascade response of the HB
filter and CP filter to satisfy the Nyquist criterion.
This paper proposes a new approach for the square-root
Nyquist filter design. Different from the conventional design
methods which extract the square-root of a Nyquist filter
or obtain the square-root Nyquist filter directly by solving an
optimization problem, the proposed compensated half-band
filter group (CHFG) adopts two cascade filters to achieve
the desired SBA and ISI performances, respectively. The HB
filter is adopted as the first sub-stage without considering the
Nyquist criterion. Also, a CP filter is employed as the second
sub-stage to guarantee the cascade response of two CHFGs,
which are located in the transmitter and receiver respectively,
satisfies the Nyquist criterion.
Thus, the problems of pulse shaping and ISI suppression
are decoupled in the CHFG. When modifying the CP filter
to balance the ISI performance and the number of multi-
pliers, the SBA performance determined by the first sub-
stage HB filter would not be affected. Obtaining different
ISI performance without affecting the transition bandwidth
and SBA performance is achieved. Moreover, the number of
multipliers for implementing the CHFG is less than that of
the other known square-root Nyquist filters under some cer-
tain conditions which most wireless communication systems
work on.
Section II introduces the structure of the CHFG. Section III
verifies the performance of the CHFG by design exam-
ples. Section IV summarized the advantages provided by the
CHFG. Then, some conclusions are given in Section V.
II. STRUCTURE OF THE PROPOSED FILTER GROUP
Fig.1 shows the structure of the CHFG for the transmitter
and receiver. In the transmitter, the HB filter with frequency
response H (ω) is placed in the first sub-stage, followed by
the CP filter with frequency response C(ω). The matched
filter with the same structure is placed in the receiver for
maximizing the SNR.
A. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE HB FILTER AS THE
FIRST SUB-STAGE FILTER
For a band-limited communication system, the interpo-
lation/decimation is required in the transmitter/receiver.
Because the frequency response of the HB filter is symmet-
rical about π2 , the impulse response of the HB filter has zero
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FIGURE 1. Block diagram of the CHFG. (a) Transmit CHFG.
(b) Receive CHFG.
valued samples at the multiples of 2 samples counted away
from the central sample to the right and left directions [16].
Hence, with half of the coefficients being zero, the cascade
HB filters are able to implement interpolation/decimation of
2N efficiently, wherein N is the number of HB filters. Besides,
another characteristic of the HB filter is that the 3-dB cutoff
angular frequency is located at π2 , and the transition band
is approximately symmetric around this frequency. These
features make the HB filter one of the most efficient low-pass
pulse shaping filter.
Actually, a single HB filter has zero crossings at a regular
distance of 2 samples, thus satisfying the Nyquist criterion
for the ISI-free transmission. Hence, the summation of the
frequency response of the sampled signals is a constant value
throughout the whole frequency axis. However, the cascade
response of two HB filters can not satisfy the Nyquist crite-
rion. Denoted as X (ω), the cascade response of two HB filters
is given by:
X (ω) = H (ω) · H (ω) (1)
As shown in the example in Fig.2, there is a recessed area in
the curve of the X (ω) + X (π − ω), which leads to the value of
X (ω)+X (π −ω) not always being a constant. In other words,
the cascade response of two HB filters does not satisfy the
first Nyquist criterion. Notice that, because the 3-dB cutoff
angular frequency of the HB filter is located at π2 , the depth of
the recessed area described above would always be constant
as 0.5. Also in the figure, α denotes the transition bandwidth
in normalized frequency.
In general, in the proposed CHFG, the HB filter is focusing
on satisfying the SBA requirement efficiently. Also, it is
adopted as the pulse shaping sub-stage for the proposed filter
group without considering the Nyquist criterion.
B. DESIGN OF THE COMPENSATION FILTER AS THE
SECOND SUB-STAGE FILTER
1) MAGNITUDE RESPONSE OF THE COMPENSATION FILTER
As proposed in the study of [17], the flatness of the frequency
response of the cascade square-root Nyquist filters is able to
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 R. Xiao et al.: Design of Two Sub-Stage Square-Root Nyquist Matched Filter

FIGURE 2. Typical magnitude response of two cascade HB filters.

be used as a measure of ISI to find the optimum square-root

Nyquist filter. The basic idea of the CP filter is to introduce
a flatness compensating filter which can compensate the
recessed area shown in Fig.2 rather than modifying the HB
filter.
Denoted as G(ω), the cascade magnitude response of the
transmit CHFG and the receive CHFG can be expressed as
follows:
G(ω) = H (ω) · C(ω) · H (ω) · C(ω) = H 2 (ω) · C 2 (ω) (2)
To satisfy the first Nyquist criterion, G(ω) must satisfy (3)
as follows:
G(ω) + G(π − ω) = 1 (3)
π
Because C(ω) is designed to be symmetrical about 2, then:
C(ω) = C(π − ω) (4)
Substituting (2) and (4) in (3) yields: FIGURE 3. Typical magnitude response of the CP filter.

1
C(ω) = p
H 2 (ω) + H 2 (π − ω)
When designing the CHFG, firstly, H (ω) is designed
according to the SBA requirement of the system, then C(ω)
is designed according to (5). By applying the derived C(ω) to
design the CP filter, the CHFG satisfies the Nyquist criterion.
(5)
As an example, Fig.3 shows the magnitude response of
the CP filters derived from (5). For an ideal CP filter with
unlimited length, the maximum value of C(ω) in the transition
band is 1.414 (1.5 dB), or the maximum value of C 2 (ω) in
the transition band is 2 (3 dB). In the stop-band of the CP

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R. Xiao et al.: Design of Two Sub-Stage Square-Root Nyquist Matched Filter

filter, typically, the magnitude ripple of the CP filter (RCP )

is very small. However, when the length of the CP filter
becomes shorter, the maximum value of C(ω) in the transition
band becomes lower, and the ripple in the stop-band becomes
larger.

2) COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY OF THE

COMPENSATION FILTER
The CP filter is intrinsic to be symmetrical about π2 , all
the even coefficients of the CP filter are zero, which means
that the number of multipliers (Mults) would be reduced by
half. This feature significantly decreases the computational
complexity of the CP filter.
Denoting the time domain impulse response of the CP filter
as c(n), and the length of c(n) as L, assuming that c(n) is
even symmetry, and L is odd, then C(ω) can be expressed
as follows [18]:
(L−1)/2
X
C(ω) = a(k) cos(ωk) (6) FIGURE 4. The impulse response of a CP filter.
k=0
Notice that, in this paper, the CP filter is implemented by
where: the mini-max optimization algorithm for the finite impulse
L−1 response (FIR) filter design [19], [20].
a(0) = c( )
2
L−1 L−1 III. PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF THE
a(k) = 2c( − k) = 2c( + k) PROPOSED FILTER GROUP
2 2
Ideally, the proposed filter group approaches the Nyquist
L−1 criterion, and it is also a matched filter in the maximum SNR
k = 1, 2 . . .
2 sense. Besides, when applying the CHFG in a communica-
Substituting (6) in (4) yields: tion system, various other performances must be examined,
such as the SBA, the ISI performance and the computational
(L−1)/2 (L−1)/2
X X complexity.
a(k) cos(ωk) − a(k) cos(π k − ωk)
k=0 k=0 A. THE STOP-BAND ATTENUATION OF
(L−1)/2 (L−1)/2 THE PROPOSED CHFG
X X
= a(k) cos(ωk) − (−1)k a(k) cos(ωk) In the proposed method, pulse shaping is performed by the
k=0 k=0 HB filter. However, to be rigorous, the SBA performance is
determined jointly by the HB filter and the CP filter. Hence,
(L−1)/2−1
X it is expected that the CP filter would bring very little impact
= 2a(k) cos(ωk) ≡ 0, ∀ω (7)
to the SBA performance of the HB filter.
k=1,3,5...
In this paper, the minimum stop-band attenuation, known
Equation (7) would be established only if a(k) satisfies the as the SBAmin , is adopted for evaluating the SBA perfor-
following equation: mance. Assuming that the normalized magnitude response of
a square-root Nyquist filter is denoted as HSRN (ω). Then the
L−1 L−1
a(k) = 2c( − k) = 2c( + k) = 0 minimum SBA is given by:
2 2
L−1 1+α
k = 1, 3, 5 . . . −1 (8) SBAmin = −20 · log10 (max|HSRN (ω)|), ω>(9)
2 2
where ‘‘normalized magnitude response’’ means that the
Equation (8) indicates that all the even coefficients of
average of the magnitude response is set to be zero when
the c(n) are zero, which means that the Mults would be
ω 6 1−α
2 .
reduced by half. When adopting a symmetrical structure with
Then, the minimum stop-band attenuation of the proposed
linear phase, the number of multipliers used for a CP filter
CHFG is given by:
would be further reduced by half. Thus, the Mults of a CP
filter with impulse response of length L is only L−1
4 + 1. SBAmin (in dB) = max {|H (ω) + C(ω)|}
ω∈stop band
A typical impulse response of a CP filters is shown in
Fig. 4. > max {|H (ω)| − |C(ω)|} (10)
ω∈stop band

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TABLE 1. A comparison of the ISIM and Pe/Rd performance of an HB filter with/without compensation filter.
Because the maximum value of C(ω) is 1.414 (or 1.5 dB),
therefore we have:
SBAmin (in dB) > max {|H (ω)| − 1.5}
ω∈stop band
= SBAmin,HB − 1.5
where SBAmin,HB is the minimum SBA of the HB filter.
Equation (10) and (11) indicate that the CP filter will
reduce the SBAmin performance of the CHFG and its maxi-
mum reduction is 1.5 dB.
Notice that, in practice, the magnitude ripple of the CP
filter in the stop-band (RCP ) is less than 1.5 dB. Hence,
the SBAmin margin required for the HB filter is less than
1.5 dB.
FIGURE 5. Impacts of the CP filter (Mults = 5) to the SBA performance.
As an example given in Fig. 5, the CP filter has very
litter reduction in the SBAmin performance of the HB filter,
and the maximum reduction value is 0.9089 dB. Therefore,
for a given SBA requirement to the CHFG, it is enough to
give 1.5 dB margin in the HB filter design. By doing so,
the cascaded magnitude response of the HB and CP filter
would satisfy the SBA requirement of the CHFG. Then,
the problems of pulse shaping (SBAmin ) and ISI suppression
in the CHFG are decoupled.
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R. Xiao et al.: Design of Two Sub-Stage Square-Root Nyquist Matched Filter
B. ISI EVALUATION OF THE PROPOSED CHFG
1) THE EFFECTS OF THE COMPENSATION FILTER
ON ISI SUPPRESSION
For the ideal Nyquist filter, there is no ISI at the correct
sampling instance. However, for a pair of symmetric FIR
(11) square-root Nyquist filter, residual ISI will presence even
there is no sampling errors. Similar to the definition in the
study of [21], the maximum inter-symbol interference, which
is denoted as ISIM (in dB) is defined as follows for evaluating
the residual ISI:
0.5 · g(0)
ISIM = 20 · log10 ( P ); n = mM , m ∈ Z (12)
n6=0 |g(n)|
where, g(n) is the impulse response of a Nyquist filter or the
cascade impulse response of a pair of square-root Nyquist
filters, M is the over sampling factor. Obviously, the larger
the ISIM value, the better ISI suppression performance of the
filter will be.
When there are sampling errors in the receiver, the ISI
will occur even for the Nyquist filter. Because the immunity
against timing jitter of the filter is difficult to analyze ana-
lytically, several probabilities based metrics have been devel-
oped, such as those proposed in [22] and [23]. An indicator in
the form of bit error rate (BER) for evaluating the ISI in the
presence of sampling errors is given in [22] and is denoted
as Pe. And an indicator in the form of a concise formulation
is also given in [23], and is denoted as ‘‘roughness’’ or Rd.
Both the Pe and Rd are adopted in this paper to evaluate the
filter’s immunity against timing jitter.
Table 1 gives the comparison of the ISIM and Pe/Rd per-
formance of an HB filter with/without compensation filter.
Here, the Mults are limited to less than 40. It can be seen from
the table that, the compensation filter has greatly enhanced
the ISI suppression performance of the HB filter, whereas the
immunity against timing jitter of the CHFG is not deteriorated
by the CP filter, whether in terms of Pe or Rd. In other words,
the immunity against timing jitter of the CHFG is mainly
determined by the first stage filter.
2) RESIDUAL ISI WITHOUT SAMPLING ERROR
Normally, the square-root Nyquist filter is designed accord-
ing to the SBAmin requirement of the system, whereas the
Mults should be reduced as much as possible depending
on a specific ISIM requirement. However, for some perfor-
mance coupled square-root Nyquist filters, the Mults and
ISIM are uniquely determined for a given SBAmin . The method
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R. Xiao et al.: Design of Two Sub-Stage Square-Root Nyquist Matched Filter
TABLE 2. A Comparison of ISIM changes with respect to SBAmin .
TABLE 3. A Comparison of Pe1 /Rd changes with respect to SBAmin .
proposed in the study of [10] and the well-known MATLAB
function ‘‘rcosdesign’’ for square-root raised cosine filter
design belong to this category [24]. These filter design
methods are less flexible. For example, when α equals 0.1,
[10] provides a family of square-root Nyquist filters with high
SBA. However, under such transition bandwidth, the mem-
bers of the family are limited to the filters with the order
of 39, 79, or 119.
Table 2 gives the ISIM comparison between the proposed
CHFG, MATLAB function ‘‘rcosdesign’’ and the method
given in [10] under the same computational complexity. For
the example given in the table, α is required to be 0.1, and the
Mults is limited to be less than 40. As summarized above,
for the filter given in [10], the ISIM value is constant for
the given Mults requirement. Notice that, the SBAmin perfor-
mance of [10] is less than 45 dBc, which means [10] is not
able to obtain better SBAmin results than 45dBc. The Matlab
function ‘‘rcosdesign’’ has even worse performance than [10].
It can be seen from the table that the CHFG achieves better
SBA or ISIM performance under the same computational
complexity.
3) RESIDUAL ISI IN THE PRESENCE OF SAMPLING ERRORS
Table 3 gives the Pe/Rd comparison between the pro-
posed CHFG and other filters compared in this section.
It can be seen from the table that, the proposed CHFG has
nearly the same Pe/Rd performance as MATLAB function
‘‘rcosdesign’’ and [10]. The proposed method does not
degrade the Pe/Rd performance of the filter group.
It is worth mentioning that, here, the second sub-stage filter
in the CHFG is adopted for ISI suppression. Following the
same design strategy proposed here, other compensation filter
for other purpose, such as the timing jitter compensation sub-
stage filter, may also be designed. However, the timing jitter
performance is not the main focus of this paper, and would
not be discussed further in this paper.
C. COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY
1) FLOAT-POINT DESIGN RESULTS
Normally, the computational complexity is defined by the
number of multipliers used for implement the filter and is
denoted as Mults. For a series of given Mults, Fig. 6 shows the
VOLUME 6, 2018
ISIM performance comparison between the proposed method
and the study of [11]. Both methods compared are able to
strike a balance between different performances. However,
these two methods balance the performances in different
ways. Reference [11] acquires different performances by
selecting different weight to each constraint. On the contrary,
the proposed method distributes the design requirements
to the first and second sub-stages separately. In this way,
the proposal achieves the performance balancing by increas-
ing or decreasing the Mults of the CP filter. Also, the opti-
mization of the square-root Nyquist filter design becomes
very simple and efficient.
As shown in Fig.6, when the available Mults is relatively
low, the CHFG achieves higher ISIM . In other words, when
the requirement of the ISIM is relatively low, the CHFG
requires less Mults. In conclusion, the proposed CHFG can
either achieve better SBA/ISI performance or reduce the com-
putational complexity when the Mults available is relatively
low. However, with the increase of the Mults, [11] achieves
higher ISIM than the CHFG. Namely, under the condition that
most wireless communication systems work on, the CHFG is
efficient than other square-root Nyquist filters.
Notice that, though immunity against timing jitter or reduc-
ing the PAPR could also be considered when designing the
square-root Nyquist filter using the method proposed in [11],
in order to perform computational complexity comparison
under the same conditions, the jitter performance weight
factor γ 0 and the PAPR performance weight factor η are set to
be zero in the figure. Also, the definition of these parameters
can be found in [11].
Besides, both the methods compared in this section achieve
nearly the same Pe/Rd performance. Detailed results can be
found in Appendix A.
2) FIXED-POINT IMPLEMENTATION RESULTS
Table 4 shows the fixed-point implementation comparison
on Intel’s Stratix V field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA).
The SBAmin and α of the square-root Nyquist filters com-
pared in Table 4 is 45 dBc and 0.1, respectively. All the
coefficients width of the HB filter, CP filter and the filter
proposed in [11] are 16 bits. It can be seen from the table
that, under the same ISIM performance, the adaptive look-up
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FIGURE 6. The ISIM performance for different Mults.
TABLE 4. A Comparison of the fixed-point implementation.
table (ALUT) used by the CHFG are only 57% to 67% of that
proposed in [11]. The dedicated logic registers and the digital
signal processing (DSP) block are saved by 10% and 20%,
respectively.
It should be mentioned that because the HB filter and the
CP filter have half of their coefficients to be zero, which
makes the effective length of the proposed CHFG longer than
the other filters. This feature increases the delay for signals
that go through filters. Also, because the CHFG approxi-
mately double the effective length compared with the other
single-stage square-root Nyquist filters with comparable per-
formance, the number of memory units of the CHFG is also
doubled. Thus the power dissipation is also increased to a
certain extent. To illustrate the statement above, the core
dynamic thermal power dissipation estimations provided by
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R. Xiao et al.: Design of Two Sub-Stage Square-Root Nyquist Matched Filter
the Interl FPGA’s PowerPlay Power Analyzer Tool are also
shown in Table 4.
D. INTERPOLATION AND DECIMATION
The proposed root-square Nyquist filter is a 2× square-root
Nyquist filter (Here, 2× square-root Nyquist filter refers to
a square-root Nyquist filter whose interpolation/decimation
factor equals two). As for the interpolation/decimation fil-
ters of other interpolation/decimation factor, compared with
the single-stage square-root Nyquist filter, a cascade square-
root Nyquist filter composed of a 2× square-root Nyquist
filter and a series of interpolation/decimation filters would
achieve lower computational complexity. Herein, the interpo-
lation/decimation filters could be HB filters or cascade inte-
grator comb (CIC) filters [16]. For example, a single-stage
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R. Xiao et al.: Design of Two Sub-Stage Square-Root Nyquist Matched Filter

FIGURE 7. The actual implementation structure of a 16× SRRC filter.

SRRC filter with interpolation factor equals M can be com-

posed of an SRRC filter with interpolation factor equals 2
and a set of cascade HB filters with total interpolation fac-
tor equals M − 2, and this cascade filter achieves lower
computational complexity than the single-stage SRRC fil-
ter without deteriorating other performance [12], [13]. The
detailed information about this example can be found in
Appendix B. Thus, in most cases, the most important issue
is to discuss how to design a better 2× square-root Nyquist
filter.
Hence, when the interpolation or decimation factor is
greater than 2, it is suggested to introduce HB filters or CIC
filters to complete the remaining interpolation or decimation
to reduce the computational complexity.

IV. SUMMARY OF THE ADVANTAGES FOR

THE PROPOSED CHFG
In summary, the proposed CHFG has the following
advantages:
1) EASILY OBTAINING DIFFERENT ISI PERFORMANCE
WITHOUT AFFECTING THE SBA PERFORMANCE
In the CHFG, the problems of pulse shaping and ISI sup-
pression are decoupled. The HB filter is adopted to achieve
pulse shaping, and the CP filter is used to perform the ISI
suppression. Namely, when modifying the CP filter to balance
the ISI performance and the Mults, the SBA performance
determined by the HB filter would not be affected.
2) THE LOW COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY WHEN THE
NUMBER OF MULTIPLIERS IS LIMITED
In order to reduce the computational complexity, instead of
decomposing a Nyquist filter to obtain a pair of square-root
Nyquist filters, an efficient CP filter is adopted to eliminate
the ISI. Also, the number of multipliers of the CHFG is less
than the other square-root Nyquist filters under the conditions
which most wireless communication systems work on.
3) A MATCHED LINEAR PHASE FILTER
The CHFG, placed in the transmitter and the receiver respec-
tively, is a pair of matched linear phase filter. Also, their
cascade response approximately satisfies the first Nyquist
criterion.
FIGURE 8. The magnitude response of the filters shown in Table 7.
V. CONCLUSION
This paper proposed a new approach for obtaining the square-
root Nyquist filter. The proposed method adopts two sub-
stage filter group structure, each of which targeting on the
pulse shaping or ISI suppression, respectively. Theoretical
analysis and design examples have demonstrated that, for
a given SBA requirement, the proposed method is superior
to other linear phase square-root Nyquist filters to some
extent. In multiplier-limited scenarios, the proposed method
is flexible in striking a balance between the SBA and ISI
requirement. For the hardware implementation, the proposed
method has a much lower complexity in terms of combina-
tional ALUTs, dedicated logic registers and the DSP blocks.
The idea of adopting two cascaded filters to guarantee the
Nyquist criterion and pulse shaping requirement brings a new
approach in the square-root Nyquist filter design.
Appendix A
The detailed parameters and performances of the filters
in Fig. 6 are shown in Table 5 and Table 6:
Appendix B
An SRRC filter with interpolation/decimation factor
equals M can be composed of an SRRC filter with interpola-
tion/decimation factor equals 2 and a set of cascade HB/CIC

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TABLE 5. The detailed parameters of each point in Fig. 6 (α = 0.1).
TABLE 6. The detailed parameters of each point in the Fig. 6 (α = 0.2).
filters with total interpolation/decimation factor equals M −2.
Also, the cascade filters are verified to be the most effi-
cient choice in most cases, compared with the single-stage
interpolation/decimation SRRC filter or other interpola-
tion/decimation Nyquist filters [12], [13], [16].
For example, in the actual implementation, for an SRRC
filter with the interpolation factor equals 16, to achieve low
computational complexity, the structure shown in Fig. 7
would be adopted, wherein, the HBn filter denotes the HB
filter placed in stage n.
Table 7 shows the advantages of the above mentioned
design in terms of the computational complexity compared
with a 16× interpolation SRRC filter. Notice that, in this
example, α equals 0.35.
Fig. 8 shows the magnitude response of the filters shown
in Table 7.
Fig. 9 shows the magnitude response of the cascade filters
shown in Table 7. Notice that the transition bandwidth lim-
itation of the HBn filter is getting greater with the increase
of n.
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From the above examples, it can be seen that:
1) When the pass-band ripple of the interpolation/
decimation filter is small enough, the impacts of them on
ISI could be ignored. The only purpose of the HBn filter is
to suppress the 2-fold repetition image of the interpolated
signal or to prevent the aliasing of the decimated signal.
Hence, with the increase of n, the mirror image is farther
away from the baseband signal, and the transition bandwidth
of the HBn is getting wider and wider. Namely, the HBn is
getting easier to obtain with lower pass-band ripple with the
increase of n, thus also lowering the number of multipliers.
In conclusion, in most cases, the effect of the HBn (n ≥ 2) on
the ISI performance of the cascade square-root Nyquist filter
is negligible.
2) The cascade filters provide the same ISIM and SBAmin
performance as the single-stage filter except that fewer mul-
tipliers are used.
3) For the square-root Nyquist filter whose interpola-
tion or decimation factor is greater than 2, normally, it is
more important to discuss how to design a better 2×
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R. Xiao et al.: Design of Two Sub-Stage Square-Root Nyquist Matched Filter
TABLE 7. Comparison of the single filter and the cascade filter.
FIGURE 9. The magnitude response of the cascade filters shown
in Table 7.
square-root Nyquist filter. Also, it is suggested to intro-
duce the HB filters or CIC filters to complete the remain-
ing interpolation or decimation to reduce the computational
complexity.
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RUWU XIAO received the B.S. degree in elec-
tronic information engineering from the Univer-
sity of Shanghai for Science and Technology,
Shanghai, China, in 2007, and the M.S. degree in
signal and information processing from the Com-
munication University of China, Beijing, China,
in 2009. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree
with the School of Electronics Engineering and
Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing. His
research interests include analog and mixed signal
processing, communication system circuit architecture designs, and RF cir-
cuit design in wireless communication systems.
23301

QIYING LEI received the B.S. and M.S. degrees
in electronic information engineering from the
Dalian University of Technology in 2009 and
2012, respectively. She is currently pursuing the
Ph.D. degree with the School of Electronics Engi-
neering and Computer Science, Peking Univer-
sity, Beijing, China. Her research interests include
architecture designs, performance analysis, and
resource allocation in heterogeneous wireless
networks.
XUAN GUO received the B.S. and M.S. degrees
from the Communication University of China
in 2010 and 2013, respectively. He is currently
pursuing the Ph.D. degree with the School of
Electronics Engineering and Computer Science,
Peking University, Beijing, China. His research
interests include algorithms and systems for
telecommunications and signal processing, com-
puter arithmetics, and VLSI designs.
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R. Xiao et al.: Design of Two Sub-Stage Square-Root Nyquist Matched Filter
WEITAO DU received the B.S. and M.S. degrees
in signal processing engineering from the Com-
munication University of China in 2002 and 2005,
respectively. He is currently a Lecturer with the
Digital Engineering Center Laboratory, Communi-
cation University of China. His research interests
include multimedia signal processing and VLSI
DSP circuit designs.
YUPING ZHAO received the B.S. and M.S.
degrees in electrical engineering from Northern
Jiaotong University, Beijing, China, in 1983 and
1986, respectively, and the Ph.D. and D.Sc.
degrees in wireless communications from Aalto
University, Helsinki, Finland, in 1997 and 1999,
respectively. She was a System Engineer for
telecommunication companies in China and Japan.
She was a Research Engineer with the Nokia
Research Center in the field of radio resource
management for wireless mobile communication networks. She is currently
a Professor with the State Key Laboratory of Advanced Optical Commu-
nication Systems and Networks, School of Electronics Engineering and
Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing. Her research interests include
wireless communications and corresponding signal processing, especially
for OFDM, UWB, and MIMO systems, cooperative networks, cognitive
radio, and wireless sensor networks.
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