Fredric J Harris
Things We Should Not Do In Future Radios, (Future Designs Should Not Include Past Mistakes)
Wireless technology is a shining example of a disruptive innovation that has changed society in remarkable ways. The innovation has altered how people communicate, how people access information, how people are entertained, and how people conduct and schedule their social lives. Every human activity advances and grows through a number of influences. One is experience, one is market forces, another is effective education, and yet another is common wisdom. Common wisdom is entrenched perspectives and levels of understanding accepted by the community as guide posts of the process. In fact there are many examples to be found in the wireless community of common wisdom being faulty. Samuel Clemens’ comment “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble, it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so” The wireless community is not free of entrenched faulty common wisdom which is passed on to successive practitioners of the art. Universities are just as liable as industry for not examining and questioning common wisdom. In this presentation we examine the evolution of wireless technology from the early days through now and show how a number of wisdoms can be shown to not be wise but never-the-less have become entrenched in the fabric of our wireless technology
Multirate Polyphase Filters and Filter Banks, (GREEN Technology, also known as DSP Magic)
Recently, someone posted a question on a DSP blog I visit occasionally. How does one design a very narrow bandwidth low pass filter? One version of the problem is a filter with 10 Hz wide pass band, a 10 Hz wide transition band, and a 1 kHz sample rate. Stopband attenuation >80 dB with passband ripple <0.01 dB. This a very bad combination: low transition bandwidth with high sample rate! I think students post their homework problems on the blog so I seldom volunteer to do their homework. I did however read the many suggestions posted on the blog submitted by regular subscribers to the blog. They were interesting to read but nothing clever and of limited value. Some were just plain silly, but to quote a famous line, “who am I to judge?” The consensus was that some problems are hard and require lots of resources, this is one of them! All it takes is lots of filter coefficients and lots of multiply and adds. 405 taps seemed to be about the right number. When I read one suggestion from someone I know at Westminster University in London, I simply had to throw my hat in the ring. It then became a game: how small could you make the filter and still satisfy the specifications? For a week I submitted daily solutions requiring fewer and fewer coefficients. I started at 38 M&A per input sample and I stopped when I reached 6 M&A per input sample!
The presentation will show how to build narrowband filters with more than an order of magnitude reduction of workload. The only requirement is that there be a large ratio of sample rate to bandwidth. Once we learn the simple trick to accomplish this reduction we pose the question, Can we achieve similar reduction in workload when there is not a large ratio of sample rate to bandwidth? The answer surprisingly is yes! We will share the recipe for the secret sauce so you too will know how wideband filters can also be implement with more than an order of magnitude workload reduction. How about an I-Q filter pair with 1400 taps per arm replaced with a resampling filter requiring only 100 real multiplies?