A package for filter design based on MATLAB

Electric filters have a relevant importance in electronic systems because they are present in almost any electronic system. For example, communication systems, as many other electric systems, make intensive use of filtering to separate unwanted noise from the desired signal. Unfortunately, filter design is an intensive computational task requiring a significant amount of numerical calculations to obtain either the parameters of a filter transfer function or the element values for a filter circuit realization. This paper describes a software package whose purpose is to provide a tool to be used as a teaching aid in analog and digital filter design courses. The feature of this package is that it uses MATLAB for the numerical computations. The main advantage of the filter design software package described in this paper is that it makes uses of one of the MATLAB toolboxes, the signals toolbox (which is used for analog and digital filter design), but used with an interface that makes it possible even to the novice user to readily design filters, either analog or digital, without any previous knowledge of MATLAB or the signals toolbox.