A high performance architecture for computing the time-frequency spectrum

To solve the problem of detecting and displaying the changes in the spectra of nonstationary signals, there are two possible approaches. Either one uses the same estimators as for the stationary signals, but one approach uses shorter-length data blocks during which the signal is assumed to be stationary, and the other one uses the same length data and applies a time-varying spectrum estimator that accounts for the nonstationarity. A time-varying spectrum estimator called a time-varying correlogram (TVC) is a well-known estimator of the time-frequency spectrum of a nonstationary signal. In this paper, a high performance VLSI architecture for computing TVC is proposed.