Design of a 24-channel transmultiplexer

The design of a transmultiplexer capable of performing the bilateral conversion between one 1544 kbit/s digital signal (which represents 24 PCM coded voice channels) and two analog group signals (each one containing 12 voice channels in the 60-108 kHz band) is investigated. It is shown that an FIR filter bank required as part of such a transmultiplexer can be realized efficiently by cascading a discrete cosine transform processor and a weighting network. Fast convolution algorithms are derived for evaluating the cosine transform. A method of using the symmetry conditions to reduce the computation rate in the weighting network and an elegant hardware configuration for implementing it are also discussed.