The present work proposes a significant modification to conventional block pulse functions (BPF) by describing a novel set of pulse-width modulated generalized block pulse functions (PWM-GBPF) which has been utilized to develop generalized correlation matrices of operational nature. These matrices are used to determine cross-/auto-correlation of time-varying functions. Numerical examples are treated to establish the validity of the proposal. Also, a representational error analysis has been carried out for the PWM-GBPF to show that this kind of BPF set introduces a smaller error than the conventional equal width BPF. © 1995 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.