Practical Design Rules for Optimum Finite Impulse Response Low-Pass Digital Filters

Although a great deal is known about design techniques for optimum (in a minimax error sense) finite impulse response (FIR) low-pass digital filters, there have not been established any practical design rules for such filters. Thus, a user is unable to easily decide on the (approximate or exact) filter order required to meet his design specifications and must resort to tables or trial and error procedures. In this paper, such a set of design rules is given. In the case of very narrow bandwidth or very wide bandwidth filters, analytic relations between the filter parameters can be readily obtained. In all other cases, exceedingly good linear and nonlinear fits to the data can be obtained over somewhat restricted ranges of the parameters. These fitting procedures lead to a practical set of simple design rules for estimating filter order from the desired specifications.