Section 5.1. Design Overview

5.1. Design Overview

A finite impulse response (FIR) filter is a type of signal processing element whose output is determined by a weighted sum of its past and present input values. There are many types of digital FIR filters, but all are defined primarily by the size of the window (number of discrete historical samples) that are used to perform a given filter calculation. This window size is often referred as the number of filter taps.

The filter we will describe here, using C language and the Impulse C libraries, is a 51-tap FIR filter. This filter will demonstrate a single hardware process and will provide us with opportunities to introduce important aspects of C programming for hardwareconcepts that we will discuss in much greater detail in subsequent chapters.