Multisine excitation design using synchronous square wave sources

A method for generating a multisine excitation signal from the summation of multiple synchronous square wave sources is presented to reduce the power consumption and complexity of system identification hardware. The proposed algorithm is capable of optimizing a multisine frequency distribution to approximate a target frequency distribution while also preventing corruption from higher order excitation harmonics generated by system nonlinearities. One example of an optimized 11-tone logarithmically-spaced multisine signal shows no corruption from the first five odd-harmonics while achieving a common clock source frequency for the generator that is only 3.9 times greater than the maximum excitation frequency.