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IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS, VOL. 10, NO. 5, MAY 2003

Modified CIC Filter for Sample Rate Conversion in Software Radio Systems
Wajih A. Abu-Al-Saud, Student Member, IEEE, and Gordon L. Stber, Fellow, IEEE
AbstractCascaded-integrator-comb (CIC) filters perform sample rate conversion (SRC) efficiently using only additions/subtractions. However, the limited number of tuning parameters may make conventional CIC filters unsuitable for SRC in software radio (SWR) systems. A simple modification to the CIC filter that enhances its SRC performance at the expense of requiring a few extra computations per output sample is proposed. Simulation results show that the modified CIC filter outperforms the conventional CIC filter for the purpose of SRC in SWR systems. Index TermsCascaded-integrator-comb (CIC) filters, sample rate conversion (SRC), software radio systems.

I. INTRODUCTION MONG the methods described in the literature for sample rate conversion (SRC) [1][3], only a few have the computational efficiency that is required for software radio (SWR) systems. Cascaded-integrator-comb (CIC) filters [4], [5] perform SRC efficiently by using only additions/subtractions, which makes them attractive for SWR applications. However, conventional CIC filters may be unsuitable for SWR, especially for SRC factors that are close to unity, because they have a limited number of tuning parameters, and they exhibit a passband droop. that performs SRC Fig. 1 shows a CIC filter of order [4], where and are the number by a rational factor of of comb-integrator stages in the interpolation and decimation , the performance of CIC sections, respectively. For fixed filters can be altered by changing the filter order that controls the image attenuation and/or the delay of the comb stages that controls the filter bandwidth. II. CONVENTIONAL CIC FILTER The transfer function of the CIC filter for SRC by a factor is obtained by reflecting the low sample rate combs across the upsampler and downsampler to the intermediate high sample rate (IHSR) section. This results in a transfer function with respect to the IHSR given by

Fig. 1.

Conventional CIC filter of order N

+N

for SRC by R=L.

where is the interpolation factor; is the decimation factor; is the order of the CIC filter ( ); and is the of the CIC delay of each comb stage. The power response filter is (2) where is normalized with respect to the IHSR. Equation (2) shows that the CIC filter is a lowpass filter with zeros occurring and . The distribution of at multiples of zeros, over which there is limited control, is uneven, resulting in a low attenuation at some image frequencies. The effect of the uneven distribution of zeros over the undesired images becomes more significant with input signals that have wide dynamic ranges because insufficiently attenuated parts of the images may alias over low-power parts of the desired baseband signal. III. MODIFIED CIC FILTER The construction of CIC filters makes their frequency response unsuitable for specific SWR applications. An SWR system must be capable of processing narrowband channelized signals at wideband reception. Due to variations in the propagation environment, the wideband input signal to an SWR has a very high dynamic range. For example, in accordance with GSM 5.05, a GSM receiver should be capable of withstanding a blocking signal that is 85 dB above the desired signal (when the two signals are from 0.81.6 MHz apart) [6]. Depending on the location of the high-power narrowband channels in the wideband signal, the attenuation of their images may be insufficient. To achieve better performance, we suggest an SWR receiver that locates the high-power channels and accordingly

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Manuscript received February 5, 2002; revised September 4, 2002. The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Dr. Xi Zhang. The authors are with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, GCATT, Atlanta, GA 30332-0490 USA (e-mail: stuber@ece.gatech.edu). Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LSP.2003.810023

1070-9908/03$17.00 2003 IEEE

ABU-AL-SAUD AND STBER: MODIFIED CIC FILTER FOR SAMPLE RATE CONVERSION

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Fig. 2. Modified CIC filter of order N for SRC by R=L.

Fig. 3. Power response of fourth-order conventional (N = N = 2) and modified (N = 4) CIC filters for SRC by R=L = 9=10.

sets the zeros of the CIC filter close to their images to provide them with higher attenuation. The CIC filter is modified by spreading the delays in the CIC filter comb stages. While the delays of the combs in the conor delay units at the ventional CIC filter are equal to IHSR, the delays are either distributed evenly to provide a more uniform image attenuation, or they are set around specific values to provide additional suppression to particularly strong image components. The modified CIC filter has transfer function

(3) and power response (4) is a set of comb delays in delay units where of the IHSR section that provide the power response of the CIC filter with zeros at multiples of the normalized frequen. Fig. 2 shows the modicies fied CIC filter of order . For the best performance, the deare experimentally set to values in the lays to depending on the range power spectrum of the input signal such that the modified CIC filter provides the most uniform image attenuation. Fig. 3 illustrates the power response of fourth-order conventional and modified CIC filters for SRC by 9/10. The zeros of the conventional CIC filter are located at multiples of and , while the delays of the modified CIC filter are 16, 14, 12, and 10, which produce zeros at multiples of and . For a signal occupying 3/4 of the digital band, the conventional and modified CIC filters provide SNR of 15 and 50 dB, respectively, where the SNR is defined as the power ratio after lowpass filtering of the lowest power level in the desired signal to the highest power level in the images. The complexities of the conventional and modified CIC can be compared in terms of their filters of order memory requirements and number of additions (or subtractions)

Fig. 4. Input signal to conventional and modified CIC filters containing 33 frequency multiplexed channels (f is normalized with respect to the intermediate high sample rate).

per output sample (APOS). While the conventional CIC filter memory elements, the modified requires CIC filter requires memory elements on average. The integrators of the conventional and modified CIC filters require the same number of APOS. Since the integrators operate in the IHSR section, every integrator requires additions per input sample (APIS). integrator stages require a total number Therefore, the APOS. The interpolation and decimation of APIS ( combs of the conventional CIC filter require APOS) and APOS, respectively. When expanded in tree structure, the transfer function of the modified CIC filter comb branches and operates on section has a maximum of 2 zero samples between consecutive a signal that has samples of the input signal. This results in every branch requiring one addition/subtraction every samples of the IHSR signal and the comb stages requiring a maximum of 2 APIS or 2 APOS. Therefore, the conventional and and a modified CIC filters require APOS, respectively. maximum of close to unity, the modified CIC filter For values of requires approximately 3/2 the number of memory elements more and performs a maximum of APOS than the conventional CIC filter. The extra number of APOS is small for SRC factors close to unity and practical filter

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IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS, VOL. 10, NO. 5, MAY 2003

Fig. 5. Filtered signals before downsampling of (a) conventional CIC filter having SNR of 13 dB and (b) modified CIC having SNR of 28 dB.

orders when compared to the total number of computations that the conventional CIC filter requires. IV. SIMULATION RESULTS In this example, the signal shown in Fig. 4 is processed by a fourth-order CIC filter to perform SRC by a factor of 9/10. The input signal, chosen to illustrate the benefits of the modified CIC filter, occupies 0.83 of the available digital band and contains 31 equal power frequency multiplexed channels and two 25-dB higher power channels. Fig. 5(a) shows that the conventional CIC filter fails to attenuate the high-power images resulting in visible aliasing and an SNR of 13 dB. Fig. 5(b) shows that the modified CIC filter provides an SNR of 28 dB. Fig. 6 shows the output signals of both filters where the output of the conventional CIC filter [Fig. 6(a)] contains visible aliasing while the modified CIC filter [Fig. 6(b)] does not. A second-order infinite impulse resonse (IIR) filter (requiring two multiplications per output sample) is used to correct for the passband droop in the output signals of both CIC filters. Fig. 6 shows that all low-power channels have approximately equal power, i.e., there is little passband droop. V. CONCLUSION The modified CIC filter provides higher SNRs and better image attenuation than the conventional CIC filter by adjusting

Fig. 6. Output signals of (a) conventional CIC showing visible aliasing and (b) modified CIC filter (f is normalized with respect to the intermediate high sample rate). Both filters are followed by second-order IIR filter to correct for the passband droop of both filters.

the zeros of the filter to target high-power image components. SWR systems can take advantage of this flexibility when the wideband input contains narrowband channels with a high dynamic range. An SWR receiver can measure the power of different channels and correspondingly adjust the delays of the CIC filter to minimize aliasing caused by high-power narrowband channels. The modified CIC filter gains this improved performance over the conventional CIC filter at the expense of a small increase in the number of computations. REFERENCES
[1] R. E. Crochiere and L. R. Rabiner, Multirate Digital Signal Processing. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1983. [2] T. A. Ramstad, Digital methods for conversion between arbitrary sampling frequencies, IEEE Trans. Acoust., Speech, Signal Processing, vol. ASSP-32, pp. 577591, June 1984. [3] R. E. Crochiere and L. R. Rabiner, Interpolation and decimation of digital signalsA tutorial review, Proc. IEEE, vol. 69, pp. 300331, Mar. 1981. [4] E. B. Hogenauer, An economical class of digital filters for decimation and interpolation, IEEE Trans. Acoust., Speech, Signal Processing, vol. ASSP-29, pp. 155162, Apr. 1981. [5] L. Wasserman and A. N. Willson Jr., A variable-rate filtering system for digital communications, in Proc. ICASSP, 1999, pp. 14971500. [6] ETSI, Radio transmission and reception, Eur. Telecommun. Standardization Inst., Sophia-Antipolis, France, GSM 5.05, 1986.