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 image processing many other targets for filtering exist. Correlations can be removed for certain frequency components and not for others without having to act in the frequency domain. Filters are widely used in electronics and telecommunication, in radio, television, audio recording, radar, control systems, music synthesis, image processing, computer graphics, and structural dynamics.
There are many different bases of classifying filters and these overlap in many different ways; there is no simple hierarchical classification. Filters may be:
Linear continuous-time circuit is perhaps the most common meaning for filter in the signal processing world, and simply "filter" is often taken to be synonymous. These circuits are generally designed to remove certain frequencies and allow others to pass. Circuits that perform this function are generally linear in their response, or at least approximately so. Any nonlinearity would potentially result in the output signal containing frequency components not present in the input signal.
The modern design methodology for linear continuous-time filters is called network synthesis. Some important filter families designed in this way are:
The difference between these filter families is that they all use a different polynomial function to approximate to the ideal filter response. This results in each having a different transfer function.
Another older, less-used methodology is the image parameter method. Filters designed by this methodology are archaically called "wave filters". Some important filters designed by this method are:
Some terms used to describe and classify linear filters:
One important application of filters is in telecommunication.Many telecommunication systems use frequency-division multiplexing, where the system designers divide a wide frequency band into many narrower frequency bands called "slots" or "channels", and each stream of information is allocated one of those channels.The people who design the filters at each transmitter and each receiver try to balance passing the desired signal through as accurately as possible, keeping interference to and from other cooperating transmitters and noise sources outside the system as low as possible, at reasonable cost.
Multilevel and multiphase digital modulation systems require filters that have flat phase delay—are linear phase in the passband—to preserve pulse integrity in the time domain,[1] giving less intersymbol interference than other kinds of filters.
On the other hand, analog audio systems using analog transmission can tolerate much larger ripples in phase delay, and so designers of such systems often deliberately sacrifice linear phase to get filters that are better in other ways—better stop-band rejection, lower passband amplitude ripple, lower cost, etc.
Filters can be built in a number of different technologies. The same transfer function can be realised in several different ways, that is the mathematical properties of the filter are the same but the physical properties are quite different. Often the components in different technologies are directly analogous to each other and fulfill the same role in their respective filters. For instance, the resistors, inductors and capacitors of electronics correspond respectively to dampers, masses and springs in mechanics. Likewise, there are corresponding components in distributed-element filters.
See main article: digital filter. Digital signal processing allows the inexpensive construction of a wide variety of filters. The signal is sampled and an analog-to-digital converter turns the signal into a stream of numbers. A computer program running on a CPU or a specialized DSP (or less often running on a hardware implementation of the algorithm) calculates an output number stream. This output can be converted to a signal by passing it through a digital-to-analog converter. There are problems with noise introduced by the conversions, but these can be controlled and limited for many useful filters. Due to the sampling involved, the input signal must be of limited frequency content or aliasing will occur.
See main article: Crystal filter. In the late 1930s, engineers realized that small mechanical systems made of rigid materials such as quartz would acoustically resonate at radio frequencies, i.e. from audible frequencies (sound) up to several hundred megahertz. Some early resonators were made of steel, but quartz quickly became favored. The biggest advantage of quartz is that it is piezoelectric. This means that quartz resonators can directly convert their own mechanical motion into electrical signals. Quartz also has a very low coefficient of thermal expansion which means that quartz resonators can produce stable frequencies over a wide temperature range. Quartz crystal filters have much higher quality factors than LCR filters. When higher stabilities are required, the crystals and their driving circuits may be mounted in a "crystal oven" to control the temperature. For very narrow band filters, sometimes several crystals are operated in series.
A large number of crystals can be collapsed into a single component, by mounting comb-shaped evaporations of metal on a quartz crystal. In this scheme, a "tapped delay line" reinforces the desired frequencies as the sound waves flow across the surface of the quartz crystal. The tapped delay line has become a general scheme of making high-Q filters in many different ways.
SAW (surface acoustic wave) filters are electromechanical devices commonly used in radio frequency applications. Electrical signals are converted to a mechanical wave in a device constructed of a piezoelectric crystal or ceramic; this wave is delayed as it propagates across the device, before being converted back to an electrical signal by further electrodes. The delayed outputs are recombined to produce a direct analog implementation of a finite impulse response filter. This hybrid filtering technique is also found in an analog sampled filter.SAW filters are limited to frequencies up to 3 GHz. The filters were developed by Professor Ted Paige and others.[2]
BAW (bulk acoustic wave) filters are electromechanical devices. BAW filters can implement ladder or lattice filters. BAW filters typically operate at frequencies from around 2 to around 16 GHz, and may be smaller or thinner than equivalent SAW filters. Two main variants of BAW filters are making their way into devices: thin-film bulk acoustic resonator or FBAR and solid mounted bulk acoustic resonators (SMRs).
See main article: YIG sphere. Another method of filtering, at microwave frequencies from 800 MHz to about 5 GHz, is to use a synthetic single crystal yttrium iron garnet sphere made of a chemical combination of yttrium and iron (YIGF, or yttrium iron garnet filter). The garnet sits on a strip of metal driven by a transistor, and a small loop antenna touches the top of the sphere. An electromagnet changes the frequency that the garnet will pass. The advantage of this method is that the garnet can be tuned over a very wide frequency by varying the strength of the magnetic field.
For even higher frequencies and greater precision, the vibrations of atoms must be used. Atomic clocks use caesium masers as ultra-high Q filters to stabilize their primary oscillators. Another method, used at high, fixed frequencies with very weak radio signals, is to use a ruby maser tapped delay line.
See main article: transfer function. The transfer function of a filter is most often defined in the domain of the complex frequencies. The back and forth passage to/from this domain is operated by the Laplace transform and its inverse (therefore, here below, the term "input signal" shall be understood as "the Laplace transform of" the time representation of the input signal, and so on).
H(s)
Y(s)
X(s)
s
| H(s)= | Y(s) |
| X(s) |
s=\sigma+j\omega
For filters that are constructed of discrete components (lumped elements):
s
s
s
Distributed-element filters do not, in general, have rational-function transfer functions, but can approximate them.
The construction of a transfer function involves the Laplace transform, and therefore it is needed to assume null initial conditions, because
|
=s ⋅ l{L}\left\{f(t)\right\}-f(0),
|
=s ⋅ l{L}\left\{f(t)\right\}
An alternative to transfer functions is to give the behavior of the filter as a convolution of the time-domain input with the filter's impulse response. The convolution theorem, which holds for Laplace transforms, guarantees equivalence with transfer functions.
See main article: transfer function.
Certain filters may be specified by family and bandform. A filter's family is specified by the approximating polynomial used, and each leads to certain characteristics of the transfer function of the filter. Some common filter families and their particular characteristics are:
Each family of filters can be specified to a particular order. The higher the order, the more the filter will approach the "ideal" filter; but also the longer the impulse response is and the longer the latency will be. An ideal filter has full transmission in the pass band, complete attenuation in the stop band, and an abrupt transition between the two bands, but this filter has infinite order (i.e., the response cannot be expressed as a linear differential equation with a finite sum) and infinite latency (i.e., its compact support in the Fourier transform forces its time response to be ever lasting).
Here is an image comparing Butterworth, Chebyshev, and elliptic filters. The filters in this illustration are all fifth-order low-pass filters. The particular implementation - analog or digital, passive or active - makes no difference; their output would be the same. As is clear from the image, elliptic filters are sharper than the others, but they show ripples on the whole bandwidth.
Any family can be used to implement a particular bandform of which frequencies are transmitted, and which, outside the passband, are more or less attenuated. The transfer function completely specifies the behavior of a linear filter, but not the particular technology used to implement it. In other words, there are a number of different ways of achieving a particular transfer function when designing a circuit. A particular bandform of filter can be obtained by transformation of a prototype filter of that family.
Impedance matching structures invariably take on the form of a filter, that is, a network of non-dissipative elements. For instance, in a passive electronics implementation, it would likely take the form of a ladder topology of inductors and capacitors. The design of matching networks shares much in common with filters and the design invariably will have a filtering action as an incidental consequence. Although the prime purpose of a matching network is not to filter, it is often the case that both functions are combined in the same circuit. The need for impedance matching does not arise while signals are in the digital domain.
Similar comments can be made regarding power dividers and directional couplers. When implemented in a distributed-element format, these devices can take the form of a distributed-element filter. There are four ports to be matched and widening the bandwidth requires filter-like structures to achieve this. The inverse is also true: distributed-element filters can take the form of coupled lines.