Frequency spectrum based low-area low-power parallel FIR filter design

Parallel (or block) FIR digital filters can be used either for high-speed or low-power (with reduced supply voltage) applications. Traditional parallel filter implementations cause linear increase in the hardware cost with respect to the block size. Recently, an efficient parallel FIR filter implementation technique requiring a less-than linear increase in the hardware cost was proposed. This paper makes two contributions. First, the filter spectrum characteristics are exploited to select the best fast filter structures. Second, a novel block filter quantization algorithm is introduced. Using filter benchmarks, it is shown that the use of the appropriate fast FIR filter structures and the proposed quantization scheme can result in reduction in the number of binary adders up to 20%.