Design and implementation of a new digital automatic gain control

A new design method of an all-digital automatic gain control easy to implement is described and tested. The discretisation of the instantaneous gain provides a recursive form that merges the exponential function with the level detection. The first proposed circuit is well adapted for a software implementation. It comprises a simple control loop and two multipliers. It does neither contain digital filter nor divider and its setting only requires a loop gain parameter. Some tests were conducted on real digital audio signals with a dynamic range of 80 dB and they validate this approach. Under some conditions, the second circuit can even be simpler since it requires only one multiplier. It is well adapted to an field programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation for high speed signal processing.