Low-pass filterA low-pass filter is a filter that passes signals with a frequency lower than a selected cutoff frequency and attenuates signals with frequencies higher than the cutoff frequency. The exact frequency response of the filter depends on the filter design. The filter is sometimes called a high-cut filter, or treble-cut filter in audio applications. A low-pass filter is the complement of a high-pass filter. In optics, high-pass and low-pass may have different meanings, depending on whether referring to the frequency or wavelength of light, since these variables are inversely related.
Audio signal processingAudio signal processing is a subfield of signal processing that is concerned with the electronic manipulation of audio signals. Audio signals are electronic representations of sound waves—longitudinal waves which travel through air, consisting of compressions and rarefactions. The energy contained in audio signals or sound level is typically measured in decibels. As audio signals may be represented in either digital or analog format, processing may occur in either domain.
Analog signalAn analog signal is any continuous-time signal representing some other quantity, i.e., analogous to another quantity. For example, in an analog audio signal, the instantaneous signal voltage varies continuously with the pressure of the sound waves. In contrast, a digital signal represents the original time-varying quantity as a sampled sequence of quantized values. Digital sampling imposes some bandwidth and dynamic range constraints on the representation and adds quantization error.
Cascaded integrator–comb filterIn digital signal processing, a cascaded integrator–comb (CIC) is an optimized class of finite impulse response (FIR) filter combined with an interpolator or decimator. A CIC filter consists of one or more integrator and comb filter pairs. In the case of a decimating CIC, the input signal is fed through one or more cascaded integrators, then a down-sampler, followed by one or more comb sections (equal in number to the number of integrators). An interpolating CIC is simply the reverse of this architecture, with the down-sampler replaced with a zero-stuffer (up-sampler).
Analog signal processingAnalog signal processing is a type of signal processing conducted on continuous analog signals by some analog means (as opposed to the discrete digital signal processing where the signal processing is carried out by a digital process). "Analog" indicates something that is mathematically represented as a set of continuous values. This differs from "digital" which uses a series of discrete quantities to represent signal. Analog values are typically represented as a voltage, electric current, or electric charge around components in the electronic devices.
Digital signal processorA digital signal processor (DSP) is a specialized microprocessor chip, with its architecture optimized for the operational needs of digital signal processing. DSPs are fabricated on MOS integrated circuit chips. They are widely used in audio signal processing, telecommunications, , radar, sonar and speech recognition systems, and in common consumer electronic devices such as mobile phones, disk drives and high-definition television (HDTV) products. The goal of a DSP is usually to measure, filter or compress continuous real-world analog signals.
Filter (signal processing)In signal processing, a filter is a device or process that removes some unwanted components or features from a signal. Filtering is a class of signal processing, the defining feature of filters being the complete or partial suppression of some aspect of the signal. Most often, this means removing some frequencies or frequency bands. However, filters do not exclusively act in the frequency domain; especially in the field of many other targets for filtering exist.
Digital signalA digital signal is a signal that represents data as a sequence of discrete values; at any given time it can only take on, at most, one of a finite number of values. This contrasts with an analog signal, which represents continuous values; at any given time it represents a real number within a continuous range of values. Simple digital signals represent information in discrete bands of analog levels. All levels within a band of values represent the same information state.
Communication channelA communication channel refers either to a physical transmission medium such as a wire, or to a logical connection over a multiplexed medium such as a radio channel in telecommunications and computer networking. A channel is used for information transfer of, for example, a digital bit stream, from one or several senders to one or several receivers. A channel has a certain capacity for transmitting information, often measured by its bandwidth in Hz or its data rate in bits per second.
Digital signal (signal processing)In the context of digital signal processing (DSP), a digital signal is a discrete time, quantized amplitude signal. In other words, it is a sampled signal consisting of samples that take on values from a discrete set (a countable set that can be mapped one-to-one to a subset of integers). If that discrete set is finite, the discrete values can be represented with digital words of a finite width. Most commonly, these discrete values are represented as fixed-point words (either proportional to the waveform values or companded) or floating-point words.
