Losslessness and stability of LDI ladders and filters

The stability of digital ladder filters close in form, via the lossless discrete integrator (LDI) transformation, to doubly terminated LC Cauer ladder low-pass filters is studied. The LDI transformation does not necessarily map stable analogue into stable digital filters. Necessary and sufficient conditions for these digital filter to be lossless and for a corresponding doubly terminated filter to be stable are given. LDIs are often used in the design of switched capacitor (SC) filters. For this case we provide a threshold sampling rate above which the SC LDI filter retains the stability of the analogue filter. In spite of the stability problem with the LDI mapping, it has been observed that when applied to simulate analogue filters the resulting filter is stable. It can now be argued that, in these cases, other factors in the determination of the sampling rate leads typically to a choice that is also sufficiently above the threshold rate for stability. The theory described is also useful to derive more general digital filters and to perform the design of stable LDI filters exclusively in the Z-plane without reference to analogue prototypes.