Deriving the Impulse Response using Cross-Correlation

 Sometimes you need to characterize a given system or channel in terms of its impulse response. This video shows a very simple method for doing so based on a reduced form of the normal equations where we avoid matrix inversion. 

The given application shown is signal integrity (SI) in nature. We assume a lossy channel with reflections as our device-under-test (DUT). We compare the impact of using a white noise excitation versus using PAM-3 excitation on the quality of impulse response recovery. We’ll see that white noise gives a far superior result due to its statistical and frequency-domain properties.