Finite word Length Effects in Digital Filters

Srihari Mandava

The analysis and design of discrete-time systems, digital filters, and their realizations, computation of DFT-IDFT, functions of MATLAB and the computations were carried out with double precision.
This means that all the data representing the values of the input signal, coefficients of the filters, or the values of the unit impulse response, and so forth were represented with 64 bits.
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Obviously this range is so large and the precision with which the numbers are expressed is so small that the numbers can be assumed to have almost infinite precision. But when the algorithms describing the digital filters and FFT computations have to be Implemented as hardware in the form of special purpose microprocessors or application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) or the digital signal Processor (DSP) chip, many practical considerations and constraints come into play.
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The registers used in these hardware systems, to store the numbers have finite length, and the memory capacity required for processing the data is determined by the number of bitsalso called the wordlengthchosen for storing the data.
More memory means more power consumption and hence the need to minimize the wordlength.

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In microprocessors and DSP chips and even in workstations and PCs, we would like to use registers with as few bits as possible and yet obtain high computational speed, low power, and low cost. But such portable devices such as cell phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) have a limited amount of memory, containing batteries with low voltage and short duration of power supply.
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When the filters are built with registers of finite length and the analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are designed to operate at increasingly high sampling rates, thereby reducing the number of bits with which the samples of the input signal are represented, the frequency response of the filters and the results of DFT-IDFT computations via the FFT are expected to differ from those designed with infinite precision.
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So there is a great demand for designing digital filters and systems in which they are embedded, with the lowest possible number of bits to represent the data or to store the data in their registers.

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This process of representing the data with a finite number of bits is known as quantization, which occurs at several points in the structure chosen to realize the filter or the steps in the FFT Computation of the DFT-IDFT.
But when we design the hardware with registers of finite length to implement their corresponding difference equation, the effect of finite wordlength is highly dependent on the structure.
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Therefore we find it necessary to analyze this effect for a large number of structures. This analysis is further compounded by the fact that quantization can be carried out in several ways and the arithmetic operations of addition and multiplication of numbers with finite precision yield results that are influenced by the way that these numbers are quantized.

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Quantization Errors
Input Quantization Error: The conversion of continuous time input signal into digital value produces an error , which is known as input quantization error. This error arises due to the representation of the input signal by a fixed number of digits in A/D conversion process.

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 Product Quantization Error: This arises at the output of a multiplier. Multiplication of a b bit data with a b bit coefficient results a product having 2b bits. Since a b bit register is used, the multiplier output must be rounded or truncated to b bits which produces an error. Co-efficient quantization error: The filter coefficients are computed to infinite precision in theory. If they are quantized, the frequency response of the resulting filter may differ from the desired response and sometimes the filter may fail to meet the desired specifications
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