Robust Digital Filter Structures: A Direct Approach

One of the many contributions of Prof. Fettweis was the invention of wave digital filters. These filters are obtained from classical RLC filters, in particular doubly terminated lossless two-ports, by using some transformations. Namely, the voltages and currents in the circuit elements are transformed into wave-variables and then a bilinear transformation is performed. If the wave transformation is performed appropriately it results in a realizable digital filter structure which furthermore enjoys a number of robustness properties such as low passband sensitivity, low roundoff noise, and freedom from limit cycle oscillations. Prof. Fettweis and his colleagues also showed that these properties are due to the inheritence of passivity properties from the continuous-time domain into the digital filter domain. Subsequent to this landmark work, a number of researchers worked on the problem of obtaining robust digital filter structures without starting from continuous-time circuits. One of these is the structurally bounded or structurally passive class of digital filters. These structures are based on inducing structural passivity directly into the implementation and are therefore simpler, both conceptually and from a practical viewpoint. They are also more general and lead to new structures which have no natural connection to electrical circuits. This paper gives an overview of some of these developments.