Circuit Response
every model has an edge, and the figure carries it
Concept

Anti imaging filter — where it appears

The analogue filter after a converter, whose job is to pass the band and remove the images the sampling left above it. Its order is set by the ratio between the band edge and the nearest image rather than by either frequency, so the oversampling ratio decides how many poles it needs.

Named by 2 essays across one field — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

The images a zero-order hold leaves, at 0.222 of the sample rate. computed by solving, not by drawing. A 10.67 kHz tone held at 48 kHz, with every line read out of a transform of the staircase itself. The sampled spectrum repeats at every multiple of the clock and the hold multiplies all of it by one sinc, so each image survives scaled by the sinc at its own frequency: the fundamental at -0.72 dB, the largest image (1fs−f, 37.3 kHz) at -11.60 dB, which is 10.88 dB of rejection. The sinc's nulls are exactly at the multiples of the clock and the two first-order images straddle the first of them without touching it — so the hold's rejection is 25.6 dB for a tone at 0.05 fs and 1.74 dB for one at 0.45, falling to nothing at half the clock. Measured and closed form agree to 0.026%.

The nulls are where nothing is

A zero-order hold multiplies the whole repeated spectrum by one sinc, so it attenuates every image at the image's own frequency and its nulls land exactly on the multiples of the clock. Nothing is ever at a null: the two first-order images straddle it, and the closer the signal comes to half the clock the closer they come to each other. The hold gives 25.6 dB of image rejection to a tone at a twentieth of the clock, 1.74 dB at 0.45 of it, and nothing at all at half — which is the frequency the band most needs it at.

digital · Reconstruction What an oversampling ratio buys, and at two different rates. computed by solving, not by drawing. A 20 kHz band on a 48 kHz base clock, interpolated by ratios from 1 to 64. The hold's droop at the band edge falls with the SQUARE of the ratio — the fitted exponent over six doublings is -2.0113 — from 2.640 dB at the Nyquist rate to 0.0097 at sixteen times it. The nearest image moves out with the FIRST power, exponent 1.0222, from 1.40 times the band edge to 37.4. So one decision buys two things at rates differing by a factor of two in the exponent, and the third quantity — the poles a reconstruction filter needs for sixty decibels — collapses from 20.5 to 3.21 by a ratio of four alone.

One knob, and the two exponents it turns

Oversampling is quoted as buying one thing and buys two that improve at different rates. The hold's droop at the band edge falls with the SQUARE of the ratio — fitted exponent −2.011 over six doublings, from 2.640 dB at the Nyquist rate to 0.0097 at sixteen times it — while the nearest image moves out with the first power, exponent 1.022. The third quantity, the poles a reconstruction filter needs for sixty decibels, collapses from 20.5 to 3.21 by a ratio of four alone, because it is a logarithm of the second.

digital · Reconstruction

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

ReconstructionZero-order holdDesign tradeoffFilter orderImage rejectionOversamplingPower law fitSample rateVerification

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