Electronic – Is phase angle a important thing to consider when designing filters

filterphase shift

Whenever I was choosing values for filters I always ignored the phase angle plots, but should I be taking it into consideration when for example designing a high-pass filter for the input of an amplifier or a low-pass filter in the feedback network? What are the situations where it's important to know the phase angle and take it into consideration in the design?

Best Answer

From system theory we know that the negative slope of the phase response gives the so called "group delay" of the filter. For some applications - e.g. filtering of squarewave signals - we want to have a group delay as constant as possible (identical to a linear phase response) in order to retain the original waveform (in spite of filtering).

This requirement was the reason to define the Thomson/Bessel response as one of the standard filter functions. As an another example: We have allpass filters (constant magnitude over frequency) with the only purpose to shape/correct the phase response (resp. group delay) of other filter ciruits (Delay equalizer).