Development and applications of an interactive digital filter design program

We have implemented an interactive digital filter design program in the HP 1000 computer at the Department of Electrical Engineering of the University of Washington. This program allows users to design different types of filters interactively with both amplitude and phase responses displayed on graphic devices. The performance of each designed filter can be evaluated conveniently before the best one is chosen and implemented for any particular application. This program can design recursive filters, e.g. Butterworth, Chebyshev and elliptic, or nonrecursive filters with one out of six different windows, i.e. rectangular, triangular, Hann, Hamming, Blackman and Kaiser. The main outputs from this program are coefficients of a transfer function of an analog filter, a digital filter, or both. Therefore, the design of both analog and digital filters is facilitated by using this program. The program is very simple to use and does not require background in analog or digital filter principles in order to run it. The program is written in standard FORTRAN and is about 30 kbytes in size excluding the graphics display routines. Since it uses standard FORTRAN, it can be easily transported to minicomputer and microcomputer systems that have a FORTRAN compiler and minimal graphics capabilities. This program is available for distribution to interested institutions and laboratories.