Robustness of digital filters with respect to limit-cycle behavior under coefficient perturbations

Abstract

A digital filter which has been designed to be limit cycle free may exhibit limit cycles at the implementation stage. This is due to the inability to implement filter coefficients exactly in hardware when they are quantized to satisfy available wordlength requirements. Given a digital filter which is limit cycle free under zero input conditions, the work below presents an algorithm which finds a region in the coefficient space, about the nominal filter coefficient values, where in the filter remains limit cycle free. Furthermore the results of the algorithm will also indicate the availability of other machine representable numbers for the coefficients that fall within this robustness region. Hence one may even choose shorter wordlength registers for coefficient storage if the corresponding grid falls within the constructed robustness region.