Stability condition for an iir filter I have been out of touch with DSP for a while. I was trying to refresh my basics and ended up with this doubt on IIR filter stability condition. I understood that for an iir filter to be stable, the poles should be inside the unit circle which was derived from its analog counterpart (i.e poles should be on Left hand of s plane). But then is there any extra condition that poles should be only real? Could it be complex also?
For a causal system to be stable, all the poles have to be inside the unit circle. In general, they may be complex, although they always come in complex conjugate pairs in order to keep the output real for real inputs.

So, the answer is no, there are no extra requirements for the poles to be on the real axis. However, they must be complex conjugates for the output to be real for a real input.

I would like to point out that the region of convergence of the Z Transform may include the unit circle, and yet the system may be non causal (but stable). For example, consider the impulse response: $h[n] = -a^{n}u[-n-1]$, for $|a| &gt; 1$, which corresponds to a system having a pole outside the unit circle, and yet it is a stable (although non-causal) system.