Summary
The Butterworth filter is a type of signal processing filter designed to have a frequency response that is as flat as possible in the passband. It is also referred to as a maximally flat magnitude filter. It was first described in 1930 by the British engineer and physicist Stephen Butterworth in his paper entitled "On the Theory of Filter Amplifiers". Butterworth had a reputation for solving very complex mathematical problems thought to be 'impossible'. At the time, filter design required a considerable amount of designer experience due to limitations of the . The filter was not in common use for over 30 years after its publication. Butterworth stated that: "An ideal electrical filter should not only completely reject the unwanted frequencies but should also have uniform sensitivity for the wanted frequencies". Such an ideal filter cannot be achieved, but Butterworth showed that successively closer approximations were obtained with increasing numbers of filter elements of the right values. At the time, filters generated substantial ripple in the passband, and the choice of component values was highly interactive. Butterworth showed that a low-pass filter could be designed whose cutoff frequency was normalized to 1 radian per second and whose frequency response (gain) was where is the angular frequency in radians per second and is the number of poles in the filter—equal to the number of reactive elements in a passive filter. If = 1, the amplitude response of this type of filter in the passband is 1/ ≈ 0.7071, which is half power or −3 dB. Butterworth only dealt with filters with an even number of poles in his paper. He may have been unaware that such filters could be designed with an odd number of poles. He built his higher-order filters from 2-pole filters separated by vacuum tube amplifiers. His plot of the frequency response of 2-, 4-, 6-, 8-, and 10-pole filters is shown as A, B, C, D, and E in his original graph.
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