A system that performs the mathematical operation in signal processing on a sampled signal to reduce or enhance certain aspects of that signal is known as a digital filter. Its main objective is to remove the unwanted parts of the signal. This article gives information about the advantages and disadvantages of the digital filter to know more about it.
Advantages of digital filter :
- Digital filter has characteristic like linear phase response.
- The performance of the digital filter does not vary with environmental parameters.
- Digital filters used at very low frequencies, for example in a biomedical application so-called as an adaptive filter because the frequency response can be possible to adjust automatically with an implementation of the programmable processor.
- The digital filter is highly flexible possible to filter several input sequences without any hardware reapplication.
- From unit to unit the performance of the digital filter is repeatable.
- In the case of the analogue filter maintenance is frequently required but for digital filters is not required.
- It is used where the use of an analog system is impractical due to its operating level is at low frequency.
- The digital filters are portable.
- In the case of the digital filter; since the filtering is done with the help of a digital computer, both filtered and unfiltered data can be saved for further use.
- The hardware of digital filters can be reduced similarly, thus the power consumption can be reduced.
- Digital filter is easily designed, tested and implemented on a general-purpose computer or work-station.
- Digital filters do not suffer from drift and dependent on temperature so they are extremely stable with respect to both time and temperature.
Disadvantages of digital filter :
- It is expensive.
- The signal bandwidth of the input signal is limited by ADC and DAC.
- The bandwidth of the digital filter is much lower than an analogue filter.
- Quantization noise is present.
- The accuracy of the digital filter depends on the word length used to encode them in binary form.
- It required more design and development time compared to an analogue filter.