National Instruments, LabVIEW

National Instruments launches LabVIEW Digital Filter Design Toolkit 8.20

News Release from: National Instruments
21/11/2006

National Instruments has announced the latest version of the NI LabVIEW Digital Filter Design Toolkit, a comprehensive collection of tools for designing and implementing digital filters. As a part of the LabVIEW graphical system design platform, the Digital Filter Design Toolkit delivers features – including new text-based MathScript functions for advanced filter design, new support for multirate filter design and implementation and enhanced fixed-point code generation – that help embedded designers streamline all aspects of digital filter design, including specification, design, analysis, prototyping and deployment.

“With the latest edition of the NI LabVIEW Digital Filter Design Toolkit, embedded designers can choose between graphical and text-based approaches for digital filter design, analysis and implementation,” said John Pasquarette, NI Director of Software Marketing. “The toolkit simplifies the process of getting filter designs from concept to target, starting from LabVIEW graphical or text-based designs to deployment on an FPGA, DSP or embedded processor.”

Engineers can use the new design tools for floating-point and fixed-point multirate filters for decimation, interpolation and rational resampling with fixed-point code generation capability. Multirate filters are useful for connecting components of digital signal processing (DSP) systems that operate at different sample rates. The latest version of the LabVIEW Digital Filter Design Toolkit offers enhanced code generation capability with better use of FPGA resources, making it possible for filters to share coefficients and control resources among multiple channels.

The LabVIEW Digital Filter Design Toolkit extends LabVIEW with functions and interactive tools for design, analysis and implementation of digital filters. Engineers who are new to digital filters can take advantage of interactive design tools to rapidly explore classical designs, and experienced engineers will find a wide variety of filter design algorithms, filter topologies and analysis tools for design, modeling and implementation of both fixed-point and floating-point digital filters. For fixed-point designs, engineers can also model quantisation effects and automatically generate ANSI C and LabVIEW FPGA code for deployment on FPGAs, DSPs or other embedded targets.

Digital filters are a fundamental component of many signal processing applications. In academia, they are a fundamental concept in teaching and research. Application areas range across audio, communications, signal conditioning, RF and sonar/radar.