Digital Waveform Generation
Since childhood, I have always been fascinated with the generation of electronic signals. Originally, this was confined to wholly analogue techniques such as relaxation and phase-shift oscillators, operational function generators and charge-balancing voltage-to-frequency convertors. Apart from my professional career as an analogue circuit designer, this interest has been directed towards electronic music synthesiser design.
In 1981 while in San Francisco I bought a copy of Musical Applications of Microprocessors by Hal Chamberlin. This book introduced me to many new digital techniques for generating periodic (and aperiodic) waveforms. The subsequent advance of digital signal processing hardware and software now means these techniques can be enhanced and readily implemented at low cost. In 2013 my first book, Digital Waveform Generation, was published by Cambridge University Press. This book was conceived primarily as a practitioner’s technical reference. It develops both the theoretical foundations and application methods for generating sinusoidal and arbitrary waveforms.