The Convolution Integral

CONTINUOUS TIME LTI SYSTEMS: THE CONVOLUTION INTEGRAL

In analogy with the results derived and discussed in the preceding section, the goal of this section is to obtain a complete characterization of a continuous-time LTI system in terms of its unit impulse response. In discrete time, the key to our developing the convolution sum was the sifting property of the discrete-time unit impulse-that is, the mathematical representation of a signal as the superposition of scaled and shifted unit impulse functions. Intuitively, then, we can think of the discrete-time system as responding to a sequence of individual impulses. In continuous time, of course, we do not have a discrete sequence of input values. Nevertheless, as we discussed, if we think of the unit impulse as the idealization of a pulse which is so short that its duration is inconsequential for any real, physical system, we can develop a representation for arbitrary continuous-time signals in terms of these idealized pulses with vanishingly small duration, or equivalently, impulses. This representation is developed in the next subsection, and, following thet, we will proceed very much as to develop the convolution integral representation for continuous-time LTl systems.

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