FIESTA II a software tool for electronic filter design

Abstract

This thesis describes a software program, FIESTA II, for the design of electronic filters. It is an expanded version of the FIESTA program written at Texas A&M University in 1989. It is a complete tool for both approximation and synthesis of many types of analog filters. One goal of this research was to design a generalized program for filter design that would be easy to use, powerful, and most of all, expandable. Most filter design programs are very limited in their scope, only performing basic approximations and supporting the most conventional of filter implementations. Plus, they offer virtually no way for the user to expand the program to perform more sophisticated filter design. Additionally, it is hoped that FIESTA II, with its special modular and generic design, will serve as a basis for future work in automatic analog circuit synthesis. The research began with the porting of the original FIESTA from Apollo workstation to generic ANSI-C/UNIX format. Then, the code was reorganized and an industry-standard X-Windows graphical user interface was added. Next, several new and advanced features were added, such as quasi-elliptic magnitude approximation, optimized s-z transformations, leapfrog topology, additional implementations (passive RLC, active-RC, switched-capacitor, MOSFET-C), and user-defined synthesis structures. Experimental results, some of which are included here, prove that FIESTA II is an effective filter design tool. It contains many features which are unique to programs for filter design. In conclusion, FIESTA 11 provides a convincing case for the feasibility of automatic design of analog circuits.