SBIR-STTR Award

The Numericus Group, LLC (TNG) is proposing a paradigm shift for digital filter design, opening a number of technological opportunities that TNG is uniquely qualified to pursue. At the heart of this new paradigm are algorithms that are guaranteed to converge and do not require an expert to oversee their operation, unlike many existing algorithms commonly used today. The new approach allows us to automatically design robust, highly efficient filters that achieve any target specifications within a user-supplied accuracy. The new algorithms will lead to new types of electronic devices that autonomously correct for temporal and spatial variations in their operating environment inherent, for example, in all communication channels. Importantly, it becomes practical to compensate for manufacturing variations of electronic devices significantly improving their performance. Moreover, these new algorithms are critical for"hard"design problems, e.g. phase compensation filters. Rapid and reliable automatic design of these filters has widespread application since any analog hardware introduces frequency dependent phase perturbations that now can be efficiently corrected. TNG will pursue commercial products based both on software and hardware implementations of the new algorithms and anticipates a customer base spread across a variety of fields.

Benefit:
Results of Phase I of this project will lay the foundation for developing commercial products in Phase II that incorporate our new filter design algorithms. For Phase II, TNG has already identified a potential partner and will develop both software and hardware implementations for reliable automatic design of near-optimal filters. Since this method overcomes limitations of current filter design technology, it opens up a number of opportunities across many areas of interest to the Air Force.

Keywords:
Automatic digital fi

The Numericus Group, LLC has demonstrated during Phase I that our new approach to digital filtering vastly outperforms existing algorithms. At the heart of this new approach are algorithms that are guaranteed to converge and do not require an expert to oversee their operation, unlike many existing algorithms commonly used today. The new approach allows us to automatically design robust, highly efficient filters that achieve any target specifications within a user-supplied accuracy. These new algorithms represent profound advances in the state of the art in two primary areas: applications that push the limits of existing technology, and applications where automatic filter design is critical. Importantly, both types of applications are crucial to military users. During Phase II, we will transition many of these algorithms from prototypes to commercial software packages, and release this software through signal processing suites widely used in military and non-military sectors. We will demonstrate the superiority of our new packages over existing packages by using them to solve two challenging filtering problems from a classified SIGINT program that processes data from a USAF collector.;

Benefit:
Products developed during Phase II of this project will be released through signal processing suites widely used by military and non-military users. Thus, users will benefit immediately from this new digital signal processing technology. In particular, our new technology can improve throughput, reduce latency, and increase accuracy in many existing time-critical military systems--a fact that we will demonstrate on a real-world cutting edge SIGINT program that processes USAF data. Products developed during Phase II of this project also lay the groundwork for additional products to be developed during Phase III. Because our algorithms are robust and guaranteed to converge without the need for an expert to guide the filter design process, it is possible to use our algorithms to compensate for device-specific phase distortions. This capability has numerous military applications, which we will pursue during Phase III.