Digital lossless transfer matrices and vectors (power-complementary vectors) are discussed for applications in digital filter bank systems, both single rate and multirate. Two structures for the implementation of rational lossless systems are presented. The first structure represents a characterization of single-input, multioutput lossless systems in terms of complex planar rotations, whereas the second structure offers a representation of M-input, M-output lossless systems in terms of unit-norm vectors. This property makes the second structure desirable in applications that involve optimization of the parameters. Modifications of the second structure for implementing single-input, multioutput, and lossless bounded real (LBR) systems are also included. The main importance of the structures is that they are completely general, i.e. they span the entire set of M×1 and M×M lossless systems. This is demonstrated by showing that any such system can be synthesized using these structures. The structures are also minimal in the sense that they use the smallest number of scalar delays and parameters to implement a lossless system of given degree and dimensions. A design example to demonstrate the main results is included
