Sine wave look-up table generation

2010-03-05

Here is a method for generating a sine look-up table in case you have little (a few kilobytes of) program memory. The idea goes like this: Let's say you have a sine wave lookup table of length 1024 with a 24-bit amplitude range. If you take the difference between successive samples, the range of the numbers is reduced. If you repeat the process a total of 3 times, the data will be dominated by the 3rd differential of the quantization noise and will have a range of -4 to 3, which can be conveniently stored in 3 bits only. This program below does the reverse, it generates the sine table from the 3-bit values, and also takes advantage of the symmetry properties of sine. So, instead of wasting 1024 program memory words for storing the original sine table, in the c-language implementation below, the compressed data takes only 35 24-bit words and the decompression code hopefully not too much more.

Here is a spreadsheet that illustrates the algorithm: sinetable.xls. The above implementation additionally embeds the seeds 0 and -3 in the magic data