Customer Reviews

Multirate Signal Processing for Communication Systems

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Several years ago, my company hired Fred Harris as a consultant to help create an extremely complex multi-channel digital receiver. As it turned out, we could not have found a better candidate. Fred doesn't just offer state-of-the-art processing techniques - many of which he himself has developed - his pragmatic focus on efficiency and real-world implementation is truly refreshing.

This superb book delivers that same approach and philosophy in a very readable, approachable text. Unlike the vast majority of books in the field, which teach only the mathematics of signal processing, Fred teaches you what it really means, and how to make it work. You'll learn extremely efficient signal processing techniques, but even more importantly, you'll gain a much deeper understanding of digital communications that will change the way you approach systems design. From my perspective, this is quite simply the best book available for practitioners who are creating advanced digital communications systems.

Do you want to become a better engineer? Buy it!

With excellent clarity, multirate filters are described, derived and then implemented. Any DSP filter designer will benefit from this book, advanced or not. Also, a series of proprietary filter structures have been 'donated' to the DSP community in this book, wherein some of the most effecient filter structures I've ever seen are explained and implemented.

I purchased the book "Multirate Signal Processing for Communication Systems" by Fredric J. Harris because it contained an entire chapter devoted to the Cascaded Integrator Comb (CIC) filter. This filter, sometimes referred to as the Hogenauer Filter, can be used to implement efficient multirate decimation and interpolation filters for large sample rate changes.

To date no author of any book or technical paper that I am aware of has ever been able to explain the mathematics of pruning bits in each of the N stages of a CIC decimation filter design. I had high hopes that Harris's book would finally be the one book that would go where no book has gone before.

Unfortunately the book could not be previewed on Amazon so I bought the book on faith alone. I ended up being disappointed. In his treatment of CIC filters that are used for sample rate decimation he presents an obtuse equation with 6 variables that is supposed to explain something about determining the number of bits that can be pruned from each stage of an N stage CIC decimation filter. The problem is, this equation was presented right out of the blue, without any definition of what the 6 variables were. Nothing preceded this equation, or followed this equation, that was relevant to explaining what the equation was or how to interpret it. Somehow the reader is supposed to magically figure out how this equation and all 6 of its undefined variables, is relevant to CIC bit pruning. I held out some hope that this equation had been derived and explained in previous chapters, so I spent several hours searching the book from the beginning to the end for any material that was remotely connected to that equation. I had no success.

I have read many papers and many texts written by many authors that dealt with CIC filters. Without exception all the authors arm waved and side stepped this critical bit pruning topic, but this is the first time I have ever seen anything as crazy as this.

Since I bought the book, I went ahead and read the remainder to see if it contained any new material applicable to the field of multirate digital signal processing. It did not.

My impression of this book is that it is well suited for engineering managers who need a quick and glossed over summary of multirate DSP basics and buzz words so that they can sit in a conference room, nod their heads, and give the appearance of understanding what a design engineer is presenting.

This book really isn't of much use to an "in the trenches" DSP design engineer. It contains no detailed engineering design information, no valuable design examples, no insight to real world problems, and it contains no real world design issues and their solutions. There are no illustrative engineering applications presented that utilize multi rate signal processing.

The book does contain a lot of illustrations that look to be transplanted Mat Lab plots but there is not a great deal of associated text or mathematics that explains the intent of these plots.

Even though my review is negative, I hope that it is presented in a positive way. I guess I am disappointed because I paid about 78 dollars for this book and I will never get any meaningful engineering use from it.

In summary, this book is not a useful resource for a DSP design engineer. For practicing design engineers involved in Multi Rate designs, I would recommend the technically excellent book by Rabiner and Crochiere titled "Multirate Digital Signal Processing", published by Prentice Hall 1983. It is a bit difficult to read, but if you sit down with a pencil and paper and work the examples, study the equations, and make these equations meaningful by drawing the DSP architectures that they describe you will come away with a deep understanding of the subject.

I was hoping to get a good understanding of multirate DSP out of this text, having no knowledge of it previously. However, I was not succesful. The text starts out well with a practical illuminating example of the use of multirate signal processing. However, I was not able to absorb much knowledge in the subsequent chapters and gave up on continuing. There are very few equations in this book, which to me was initially promising as I am tired of DSP math books. The author relies more on graphics and figures to explain his point, but I found that the detail was lacking. Perhaps someone with stronger background in this area would be better served by this text.

Every decade or so a book comes out that distills a lot if scattered knowledge on an important subject into one concise and comprehensible tutorial. This is such a book. It introduces new ideas on better ways to skin the proverbial DSP cat!

This book clearly explains sampling rate switching architectures and how they can greatly reduce processing cycles and simplify digital and analog hardware. I've used a few of these tricks in the past, but what an eye opener to see so many great examples of sneaky DSP.

Fred Harris makes it clear with vivid examples and MatLab illustrations that using multi-rate signal processing moves you into a whole new class of implementations. No longer does one ask, "What sampling rate do I need to satisfy Nyquist? The question is now, "What sampling rate do I need in each section to optimize the design? This book helps the DSP practitioner answer that question. The sampling rate degree of freedom liberates! Use it and prosper!

I wish this work were available when I was implementing multi-rate, multi stage filters with MSI integrated circuits and a wire wrap gun! But we are now in the FPGA world, and professor harris's work is in tune with today's hardware implementations. His attention to implementation efficiency with realistic comparisons is valuable. My only minor "ding" would be that some of the MATLAB code is not well documented and the results take some effort to interpret. That said, having the MATLAB code is a BIG plus. Even better would be to have Simulink models of the filters.

Since fred harris is my all time favorite professor I may be a little biased. From what I have read so far it is in keeping with his style of being able to explain complex subjects in an understandable manner. After 30 years in the industry I am still using the tricks he taught me.

I am a graduate student at SDSU, and i think that prof harris is one of the greatest people in his field, i don't just hardly recommend to buy this book but i highly recommend to enroll to his classes, and its not only for people who wants to do Master's but even Electrical Engineers who is practicing in the field of DSP, VHDL, SDR, and Digital Communications.

This book is both highly advanced and at the same time extremely easy to comprehend. I learned more of practical multirate DSP from this book than from several years of University courses. It just proves once again that fred harris is a living genius! This book does not simply teach you but also inspires you and awakens your expectations. Every chapter (and additional matlab code) provides you with simple and up to the point effective and elegant solutions to most modern DSP issues. Channel shaping with modified SRRC, fractional rate matching including Farrow filter, FFT-based channelization, multirate FIR, IIR, CIC etc. Each topic here can be a book itself. And yet fred harris is able to present it in a short, clear and extremely practical (that is rare) way. This book is a MUST for anybody who considers himself a DSP engineer.

The content of this book is very attractive and helpful for both students and engineers.
I think if the figures were more professional, that would be better. They're so different from what I have read in other books, which spares me a long time to get used to.