Third IEEE Signal Processing Workshop on Signal Processing Adavances in Wireless Communications,Taoyuan, Taiwan, March 20-23.

2001

An Efficient Decimation Sinc-Filter Design for Software Radio Applications

M. Laddomada, L. Lo Presti
Dep. Elettronica, Politecnico di Torino, C.so Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, ITALY, laddomada@lpolito.it, 1oprestiQpolito.it

M. Mondin, C. Ricchiuto
Dep. Elettronica, Politecnico di Torino, C.so Duca degli A'bruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, ITALY, mondinOpolito.it, ricchiutoOcclix6.polito.it

Abstmct- During these L s years, the software radio has at emerged as the only way t o design a multimode, multistandard transceivers that support, everywhere, any communication standard. Software radio, however, requires not only powerful transceiver architectures, but also efflcient digital signal processing algorithms. In this paper a method to design and implement a very efficient decimation fllter for a Sigma-Delta converter is proposed. The main idea of this article is to free the positions of the zeros of the classical decimation Sinc-Alter so to attain a high selective frequency behaviour. The filtering stage is realized by a classical sinc-fllter cascaded with two other fllters obtained from the flrst one by rotating its zeros by two opposite angles. The whole cascade yields to a simple recursive structure with a frequency behaviour more selective than a Sinc-Alter h o u n d the noise fold frequency bands. Although the design method may be extended t o a multistage implementation, the fllter design proposed in this article deals with the flrst flltering stage. Since the designed fllter eliminates the most part of the quantization noise, the following filtering stages may be designed with relaxed speciflcations adopting classical fllter design methods.

Fig. 1. Structure of a EA converter.

Fig. 2. Double stage filter architecture.

I. INTRODUCTION
Many papers in the literature have discussed the problem of finding an efficient way to realize a decimation process that follows a EA A/D converter. Some books deal with this argument in an exhaustive way [l],[2]. In the practical applications, a common decimation filter with a simple realization is the Sinc-filter [3), 141. Although this filter has a very simple structure, it does not guarantee a satisfactory frequency response. For this reason, other filtering stages with a more selective frequency behaviour must be used after a Sinc-filter [5]. The stopband attenuation achieved by many Sinc-based filter design methods presented in the literature is constrained by the position of the zeros of the transfer function. Consequently, the only way to increase the stop-band attenuation is to use higher order filters. This approach, however, increases the filter complexity and, at the same time, the computational load. Based on these considerations, the concept proposed in this article (see [SI)consists in realizing the decimation filter by freeing the positions of zeros of the transfer function. In this manner it is possible to optimize the positions of the zeros so to obtain the desired stop-band attenuation. The paper is organized as follows. Section I1 introduces the decimation concept and outlines the notation applied throughout the paper. In section I11 the proposed filter

design method is discussed. Section IV shows some results obtained by the proposed modified Sinc-filter design and compares them with the basic Sinc-filter. Finally, section V draws the conclusions.

11. GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT SIGMA-DELTA CONVERTERS

A EA converter is made by two main stages (Fig. 1). The first stage contains a modulator, that is an oversampler and a quantizer, which converts the input signal z(t) in a digitized output stream. This task is accomplished by performing an oversampling at fs >> f ~ where f~ = 2B, , is the Nyquist rate and B, is the input signal bandwidth. The oversampling ratio is defined as p = = The output of the modulator may be considerexas a discretetime signal y,, representing the roughly quantized version of the sequence of samples z(n/fs). The first oversampling stage exchanges resolution with speed. The second stage, the decimator shown in Fig. 1, causes the discrete signal yn to achieve a higher resolution and a rate less than fa. Since the decimation function is a sampling process in the discrete-time domain, it requires, as a first step, an anti= $. aliasing low-pass filter with bandwidth W , = A decimation filter for a EA converter must be generally designed taking into account very severe specifications, due to the high level of the quantization noise, especially at high frequencies. For this purpose, in the real applications the architecture shown in Fig. 2 is implemented. The two filters H D ( z )and H K ( z ) are both lowpass, but with

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different characteristics from the point of view of both specifications and implementation. Both filters are designed so that their frequency characteristics are assigned in the frequency range 0 < w < 112 and the oversampling ratio is
p = DK.

The Sinc-filter, which is a classical solution for the first st+ge decimation filter, has the following transfer function and frequency response:
Fig. 3. Modified Sinc architecture; c = 2cosa and 6 = 1

+ 2cos(Da).

where D is the decimation ratio. From this transfer function is possible to observe that the attenuation around any zero is not sufficient to guarantee a good anti-noise filtering. This situation verifies also using a cascade of J Sincfilters because, in this manner, J zeros are put in the same position, one over the others.

where q is of the order of 1 . If q < 1, the zeros are put inside the frequency band where the most significant part of the input spectrum is contained. If q > 1 more relaxed specifications can be assigned in the second stage. In fa,&, in this case some denoising at the free intervals is performed at the first stage. At this point the first stage decimation filter can be written as

111. MODIFIED SINC-FILTER

The design of the proposed filter is based on the following where a = 1 2 cos a and b = 1 2 cos(Da). considerations. If we apply a clockwise rotation by an angle The frequency response corresponding to the previous a to any zero equation is
2 ,1-

ejg-i i = l , - . . , D- 1

(3)
An important feature of this filter is that its phase is linear. Several recursive structures can be found, depending on the way of writing the transfer function. In Fig. 3 a conjiguration with two multipliers, one at high rate and the ofher one at low rate, is shown. In this figure c = 2cosa. As, it is evident, this structure exhibits a very low complexity, and it is very flexible, as the null frequency points can be easily located in any point of the null intervals, by properly choosing the value of a. IV. RESULTS

of Eq.(2), we obtain the following transfer function

(4)

In the same manner, by applying opposite rotation to the zeros of Eq.(2), we obtain the following transfer function

(5)
These two filters have complex coefficients but their cascaded yields to a filter H T ( z )with real coefficients since the zeros of H,(z) are complex conjugate pairs. The cascade of the two filters has the following transfer function

In this section we show some results obtained by decimating an oversampled data stream outputs from the sigma 1 1 - 2 cos(aD)z-D z-2D H,(r) = H,(Z)Hd(Z) = delta modulator with the modified Sinc-filter. The impleD2 1 - 2 ~ 0 ~ a z + l2 - 2 (6) mentation with a classical Sinc-filter is compared with a It is straightforward to verify that this filter has null fre- modified Sinc-filter. The magnitude of the frequency response of a modified quency points at a a Sinc-filter is shown in Fig. 4. -f(7) Fig. 5 shows the attenuation around the first zero of a D 2n where i is an integer number whose maximum value is re- classical Sinc-filter and a modified Sinc-filter for different values of a. The dotted curve shows the magnitude of a lated to the decimation factor D . At this point, if a is chosen in such a way as to put classical Sinc-filter, while the continuous curves refer to zeros in the null intervals, this filter, cascaded to a classical three different modified Sinc-filters which have the paramSinc-filter, can be used t o greatly increase the stopband eter a displayed. This figure shows that the attenuation attenuation in the null intervals. A convenient choice could band of a modified Sinc-filter around the zero increases when a increases. be a = 2rWz, or, more in general, Fig. 6 shows the signal to noise ratio for a modified Sinca = qznw, (8) filter as a function of the rotation angle a.

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Fig. 4. Magnitude response of a Modified Sinc-filter. The Decimation factor is equal to 16 and the rotation angle a is equal to 0.03.

Fig. 6. Signal to Noise ratio versus angle a achieved by a modified Sinc with a decimation factor= 16.

Filters, IEEE %ns. Circuits and Sps., vol. CAS-31, pp 913924, November 1984 J. C. Candy, B. A. Wooley, 0. J. Benjamin, A Voiceband Codec with Digital Filtering, IEEE 5% Commun., vol. COM-29, pp. 815-830, June 1981 H. B. Hogenauer, A Canonical class of digital filters for decimation and interpolation IEEE f i n s . Acoust. Speech, Signal Processing, vol. ASSP-29, pp. 155-162, Apr. 1981 L. Lo Presti Eficient Modified-Sinc Filters for Sigma-Delta A/D Converters, Submitted to IEEE Transaction on Circuits and systems I1

Fig. 5. Magnitude response for a classical Sinc-filter and a Modified Sinc-filter around the first zero, for various values of the rotation angle a.

v.

CONCLUSION

In this paper, an efficient modified Sinc-filter design has been shown. Due to its high filtering effect into the socalled null intervals, t h e proposed method yields to a high noise rejection. This characteristic is very important since, after the decimation, only the noise in the null intervals is folded inside the signal bandwidth. Consequently, this filter has the effect to reject the main amount of noise that would aliases into the useful base-band signal. For this reason, the second filter stage may be designed with relaxed specifications.

REFERENCES
[l] J. C. Candy, G. C. Temes Oversampling Methods for A/D and D/A Conversion in Oversampling Delta-Sigma Data Converters edited by J. C. Candy and G. C. Temes, IEEE Press 1992 [2] S. R. Norsworthy, R. Schreier, G. C. Temes Delta-Sigma Converters: Theory, Design and Simulation, IEEE Press, New York, 1997 [3] S. Chu, C. Sidney Burrus, Multirate Filter Designs Using Comb

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