Testimonials From Some Of Our Customers
School
of Electronic and Electrical Engineering
The
Dr Des McLernon
Director
of Graduate Studies
““I have been using MATLAB/SIMULINK over many years to
develop programs for teaching communications and signal processing. But what
DSP Creations have now done (with Slifer, Sketch-a-Filt and DSP_Speedster) is to
free up my time from writing endless code – and doing it badly! In addition, I
could never have hoped to develop (on my own) a package of such sophistication
and breadth that I can use it effortlessly during u/g and p/g lectures to
demonstrate both the fundamentals and advanced topics of signal processing and
communications.
And along with the excellent twenty introductory videos this
package can just be given directly to university students, who can then be told
to “get on with it” – and they do! It stimulates their interest, backs up the
theory from lectures and lets them experiment with ‘what if ?’
questions.
For example, there is really nothing on the market to
compare with the sixty demos in DSP_Speedster to get
students excited about signal processing and communications. And although clear
and simple to implement they are also rigorous and precise in their use of
theory and application. I have never seen better.
However, be warned – there is a downside for lecturing staff. The whole suite of programs is so sophisticated, easy to use and unfortunately, addictive, that you’ll now be spending all that precious time you’ve freed up just running through the myriad of possibilities and saying: ‘Wow – I didn’t realize that!!’ ”
Martin Beeley
Participant
in “Digital Signal Processing” [a 4-Day Course Featuring DSP_Speedster Model
Downloads to
“Anyone who has an ounce of computer experience would be
able to make a filter and use it…this experiment was very well received and carried
out.”
Department of Communication Systems
Dr. Plamen Angelov
“I had a really enjoyable tour through FIR filter design, analysis and especially the visualization of this process, which is extremely user-friendly.
It is really a pleasure to design a filter with Slifer and Sketch-a-filt. The latter includes impressive graphical abilities. Apart from what I mentioned in my last e-mail both programmes could be very useful in design projects, MSc modules on DSP as well as for some research problems. It was quite interesting to go through the design exercises you have provided.”
Department of Communication Systems
DSP in Communication
Systems MSc. Student
Simon McDonald
“As a teaching aid we students all
found Slifer helpful since we could easily and immediately
see the frequency domain effects of changing certain system parameters.
This was further helped by the audio play facility when discussing high and low
pass filters. Also the tool was great for demonstrating the use of downsampling to minimise the number of coefficients needed
to achieve a given filter specification.
When we started to use the tool
ourselves in the lab after the lecture course it became clear that it is quite
intuitive. In fact if one understands
DSP techniques then the tool becomes easy to use. Slifer
can help people to get to grips with the basics thanks to the strong
visualisation aspect.”
Kenneth V Lever
Professor of Communications Signal Processing
“Having taken delivery of Sketch-a-Filt and Slifer a couple of weeks ago, it did not take me long to become familiar with these packages: a few hours only. They really are easy to use, and I can see that they will very easily adopted by students who have had only a minimal exposure to MATLAB.
Both Sketch-a-Filt and Slifer have been cleverly designed to promote filter design as a highly interactive and rapidly creative process: designers get the designs they want in satisfyingly brief design sessions.
In Sketch-a-Filt an initial filter response can be sketched by hand, then the filter designed by invoking one or several of filter design procedures, such as Frequency-Sampling, Remez, Least-Squares and others. Particularly impressive is the Brandenstein-Unbehauen design (new to me) which can be used to economise a satisfactory FIR design by substituting a nearly equivalent simpler (sometimes much simpler) IIR design.
Slifer can be used to fine-tune filters designed using Sketch-a-Filt, or directly by first defining stylised specifications. There is a vast repertoire of hand-crafting operations available to the designer: pushing and pulling coefficients in the time domain, with or without constraints on symmetry and or complexity; locking or unlocking points in the frequency domain to a uniform or nonuniform grid; pushing poles and zeros around - whilst keeping an eye on the distribution of errors in the frequency domain, and monitoring the limits of passband and stopand ripples, by viewing the very useful Quality Measure facilty.
There is everything here to allow a novice designer to become rapidly familiar with the principles of filter design, and in the hands of a more expert designer these tools will substantially reduce the amount of time spent designing filters using more pedestrian tools.
I expect to make great use of these softwares, in the classroom, the tutorial and the laboratory - for both undergraduate and postgraduate students - to present digital filter design as a hands-on learning experience. There are already a large number of useful design exercises available for familiarisation, and it is easy to develop other exercises appropriate to the level at which the subject is being taught.”
Northrop Grumman Space Technology
Dr. Phillip Feldman
“I needed a complex baseband equivalent design to approximate an anti-aliasing filter and was simply not able to achieve it using other software on the market, despite interacting repeatedly with a leading company’s technical support personnel for almost three months. DSP Creations delivered two alternative successful designs to me in a few hours using Slifer and Sketch-a-Filt. Your software is the best available tool that I know of for design of complex baseband equivalent filters.”
Boeing
Christopher
Lusardi
Contractor
Participant
in “Digital Random Signal Analysis & Adaptive Filtering” [a 5-Day Course
supercharged by DSP_Speedster]
“Great class! I could not get this information
anywhere else. I looked for many years. All other similar courses were inferior
compared to the way this course was taught. My professors at another University
would just put equations on the blackboard and read them (and proofs) because
they were not experts in the required fields. In contrast, Dr. Cain presented
his tutorials in a way that was enlightening and inspiring!”
Terry
Bradford
Instrumentation
Engineer
Participant
in “Digital Matched Filters” [a 3-Day Course using the rich matched filter
resources in DSP_Speedster]
“The class was very useful and
informational. It was pleasant to see
both application and theory so well connected and thorough in one course. I would
recommend the class to anyone with a desire to understand and see applied
digital filters for random signals. Dr.
Cain was devoted to every student understanding not only the intent and
application of digital filters to random signals, but also the theory behind
the design and synthesis of
both filters and test environments to evaluate their
effectiveness.”
Boeing
Sean
Anderson
Participant
in “Digital Matched Filters” [a 3-Day Course using the rich matched filter
resources in DSP_Speedster]
“This course is an excellent
introduction on the foundations and scope of optimal filtering.”
Centre for Digital Signal Processing Research
King’s
College
Dr. Mohammad Shikh-Bahaei
“Some of my colleagues have also used this software as a tool in teaching their modules in the past year, and the feedback from them has been very favourable”