INTRODUCTION

Digital Lth-band FIR and IIR filters are the special classes of digital filters, which are of particular interest both in single-rate and multirate signal processing. The common characteristic of Lth-band lowpass filters is that the 6 dB (or 3 dB) cutoff angular frequency is located at ? /L, and the transition band is approximately symmetric around this frequency. In time domain, the impulse response of an Lth-band digital filter has zero valued samples at the multiples of L samples counted away from the central sample to the right and left directions. Actually, an Lth-band filter has the zero crossings at the regular distance of L samples thus satisfying the so-called zero intersymbol interference property. Sometimes the Lth-band filters are called the Nyquist filters.

The important benefit in applying Lth band FIR and IIR filters is the efficient implementation, particularly in the case L = 2 when every second coefficient in the transfer function is zero valued.

Due to the zero intersymbol interference property, the Lth-band filters are very important for digital communication transmission systems. Another application is the construction of Hilbert transformers, which are used to generate the analytical signals. The Lth-band filters are also used as prototypes in constructing critically sampled multichannel filter banks. They are very popular in the sampling rate alteration systems as well, where they are used as decimation and interpolation filters in single-stage and multistage systems.

This chapter starts with...