Digitisers gain novel FIR filtering

New FIR filter technology allows users to filter digitised data in real time with a completely flexible and user customisable FIR filter.

Gage Applied Technologies has introduced new onboard finite impulse response (FIR) filter FPGA technology in its high-resolution 14bit digitisers.

This new FIR filter technology allows users to filter digitised data in real time with a completely flexible and user customisable FIR filter.

Filtering of analogue voltage signals is a powerful method for removing unwanted signal features (like noise) and emphasising signal features of interest.

Traditional analogue filters are usually limited to rather simple filtering methods, such as lowpass filtering, highpass filtering and bandpass filtering.

Numerical filtering of digitised waveform data, such as that now available onboard Gage's 14bit digitisers, allows much more complex filtering methods such as moving average filters and Gaussian filters to be implemented.

Gage's new FIR filter technology is available as an optional field programmable gate array (FPGA) image that may be installed on its line of 14bit digitisers.

The image allows processing by an FIR filter with up to 20 taps.

FIR filtering of digitised data is performed in real time, during the transfer of data through the PCI bus to the PC, so that the analysis does not reduce the repetitive signal capture rate of the digitiser.

Data are transparently filtered with no processing required by the host PC's CPU.

The FIR Filter Technology was designed to be transparent to Gage's standard CompuScope drivers for Windows, so that no special software is required.

In fact, the optional FIR filter technology can be implemented by existing Gage customers on cards already in use in the field without requiring the card to be sent back to Gage to be reprogrammed.

"We listened to our customers carefully".

"They told us that they wanted this type of FIR filtering technology onboard our digitisers, and they wanted to be able to implement it without disturbing their existing system setup", said Eric Gillas, Gage General Manager.

"It is all about offering the best technology as quickly and as easily as possible to our customers".

"Additional application specific FPGA technology for fast, custom onboard data analysis is already in the works", Gillas added.

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