FPGA Design of a High- Resolution FIR Band-Pass Filter by Using LabVIEW Environment

Abstract

Designers regularly use Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filters to fulfil the need for current electronic design applications such as signal or image processing and digital communications because of the remarkable selectivity computational efficiency. Fast and efficient information processing requires a dedicated microprocessor or a digital signal processor that may not always be available or provide enough performance. In such scenarios, designers can configure FPGAs for processing digitized signals. One of the most popular signal processing applications is filtering. Unlike the Infinite Impulse Response (IIR) filters, FIR filters do not have analog equivalent circuits. For this purpose, continuous time-discrete time conversion is not possible with the help of transforms. Because analog filters cannot have a finite impulse response, the design methods of FIR filters can be made as windowing method, pulse response truncation, and optimal filter design method. Considering this information, it aims to digitally separate two signals with different frequencies (2.4 kHz and 4.2 kHz), which are given to the input as analog, to obtain the desired information signal and suppress other signals. We preferred to use LabVIEW graphical programming language to get the digital FIR filter coefficients. We selected rectangular windowing, set the digital filter's sampling frequency as 18720 Hz, and determined the filter's coefficient with high-frequency resolution as 24. Using filter coefficients in the real-time FPGA-VHDL environment, we showed the performance and resource consumption. LabVIEW is used for simulation as well as obtaining filter coefficients. In addition, we compared both simulation and real-time FPGA-VHDL application output waveforms and examined both platforms' advantages and disadvantages.