Zero-pad to chirp signal

1. What is the effect of zero padding?
2. How do you make a chirp signal?
3. Does zero padding affect FFT?
4. Why zero padding is needed in FFT?

What is the effect of zero padding?

Zero padding enables you to obtain more accurate amplitude estimates of resolvable signal components. On the other hand, zero padding does not improve the spectral (frequency) resolution of the DFT. The resolution is determined by the number of samples and the sample rate.

How do you make a chirp signal?

One approach to generate a chirp signal is to concatenate a series of segments of sine waves each with increasing(or decreasing) frequency in order. This method introduces discontinuities in the chirp signal due to the mismatch in the phases of each such segments.

Does zero padding affect FFT?

Zero padding allows one to use a longer FFT, which will produce a longer FFT result vector. A longer FFT result has more frequency bins that are more closely spaced in frequency.

Why zero padding is needed in FFT?

In addition to making the total number of samples a power of two so that faster computation is made possible by using the fast Fourier transform (FFT), zero padding can lead to an interpolated FFT result, which can produce a higher display resolution.