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After getting suggestion to first study FFT on square wave to understand FFT of discrete signal, I'm trying to understand the FFT of square wave.

I've coded a program, here is the details, Frequency of Wave, 100KHz

f= 100e3;  

Sampling Frequency, 1MHz

Fs = 1e6;  
Ts = 1/Fs;   %Sampling Rate
% Ts = 0.000001

t = 1/f;       %Time period of 1 Oscillation = 1/f  

% t = 0.00001
n = 0.000001:Ts:t;  %Generating Samples


% t/Ts = 10

i.e 10 Samples will be generated

% 1st  Sample at 0.000001s
% 2nd  Sample at 0.000002s
% 3rd  Sample at 0.000003s
% 4th  Sample at 0.000004s
% 5th  Sample at 0.000005s
% 6th  Sample at 0.000006s
% 7th  Sample at 0.000007s
% 8th  Sample at 0.000008s
% 9th  Sample at 0.000009s
% 10th Sample at 0.00001s

defining and plotting the square wave, Since Amplitude is not defined it will be 1 by default.

x=square(2*pi*f*n);
subplot(2,1 ,1)
stem(n,x)

Output wave,

enter image description here

Now plotting its FFT

subplot(2,1 ,2)
F=fft(x)    
plot(2*abs(F)./(t/Ts));

Output wave,

enter image description here

For the First point,

Fs / # of Samples

1000,000/10 = 100KHz <- First point = 100KHz

Number of Harmonics should be = 10 but What are the Frequency of each Harmonic ? also, why the amplitude has changed to 1.2 which is supposed to be 1

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    $\begingroup$ Shouldn't the sample at time 10 be -1, not +1? $\endgroup$
    – Jim Clay
    Oct 21, 2012 at 19:52
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    $\begingroup$ Since this question has been resurrected, I will echo @JimClay's note that the signal that you showed above is not a square wave. That can help to explain why you aren't seeing the frequency-domain characteristics that you expect. $\endgroup$
    – Jason R
    Feb 5, 2013 at 18:26

2 Answers 2

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From the Wikipedia article on the Discrete Fourier Transform:

The sequence of $N$ complex numbers $x_0, ..., x_{N−1}$ is transformed into an $N$-periodic sequence of complex numbers according to the DFT formula: $$ X_k=\sum_{n=0}^{N-1} x_n e^{-2\pi ikn/N}.$$

What you have done is taken $N=10$ integers, $n=\{1,2,...,N\}$, and turned them into $10$ time samples $t=\{T_s,2T_s,...,NT_s\}$, or $t_n=nT_s$. (To clarify my notation change, this second set is what you called $n$.)

Then you created the signal $x_n=\text{square}(2\pi ft_n)$ with period $f=(NT_s)^{-1}$and fed it into MATLAB's FFT algorithm, attempting to take the DFT of it (as the FFT is just a fast DFT). However, this is NOT what the FFT expects to see!

Your signal starts with $x_1$ and ends with $x_N$. However, if you see the definition of the DFT I gave above, it expects the signal to start with $x_0$ and end with $x_{N-1}$. Ordinarily, this would not be much of a problem, because if your signal $x$ is actually $N$-periodic, then $x_0=x_N$. However, as noted in the comments by Jim Clay and Jason R above, the signal you start with is not actually a square wave. As you can see in your screenshot, there are six "1" values and only four "-1" values. The square wave should have an equal number of "1"s and "-1"s. I do not know why the values you put in are not a proper square wave, and I suspect there is some odd detail in how MATLAB implimented the function $\text{square}$. To create a square wave, you should change the line

n = 0.000001:Ts:t;  %Generating Samples

to

n = 0:Ts:t-Ts;  %Generating Samples

or, even better, to

N=t/Ts;
n=(0:N-1)*Ts;

which makes it clear that you are sampling at integer multiples of your sampling time. The signal $x$ you generate in this way will be equivalent to what Jim Clay has generated in his answer.

As to why your signal has magnitude $\approx 1.2$ instead of $1$, you need to remember how the square wave is defined. From the Wikipedia article on the square wave:

$$x_{\mathrm{square}}(t) =\frac{4}{\pi}\left (\sin(2\pi ft) + {1\over3}\sin(6\pi ft) + {1\over5}\sin(10\pi ft) + \cdots\right ).$$

The first term of this function has frequency $f$ and magnitude $\frac{4}{\pi}\approx 1.27$. If you look at Jim Clay's plot this is exactly the magnitude in bin 2 of the function he has plotted. Up to bin $N/2+1$, the value that will be plotted in bin $k$ is the coefficient of the term in the square wave with frequency $(k-1)f$. (The $-1$ comes from MATLAB indexing beginning with one rather than zero).

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When I do everything exactly as you outline in your post, except change x to the following-

x = [ones(1,5), -ones(1,5)];

I get the following plot-

Short square wave

FFT bin 2 is the first harmonic and FFT bin 4 is the third harmonic (square waves only have odd harmonics). Likewise, FFT bin 10 is the negative first harmonic, and FFT bins 8 and 6 are the negative third and fifth harmonics, respectively. You can see that the harmonics gradually diminish in power.

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