A Rectangular Signal

Derive the DFT of a rectangular signal that appears often in DSP applications.

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A rectangular signal, also known as a rectangular window, is the signal that is most frequently encountered in DSP. This is because the fundamentals of DSP are built on the basis of continuous-time and infinite-duration signals. However, all practical signals are limited in time (say, TT seconds) that can be taken as a product between the same infinite-duration signal and a rectangular window of length TT. This process is known as windowing.

Definition

In discrete time, an odd-length rectangular sequence LL is given by:

x[n]={1,L12nL120,otherwise \begin{equation*} x[n] = \left\{ \begin{array}{l} 1, \quad -\frac{L-1}{2} \le n \le \frac{L-1}{2} \\ 0, \quad \textmd{otherwise} \\ \end{array} \right. \end{equation*}

This is drawn in the figure below for L=7L=7 and N=16N=16:

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