Efficient parallel FIR filter implementations using frequency spectrum characteristics

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 ranging from 4% to 24% and an average reduction of about 10%. Furthermore, the power consumption of these filters is reduced by 14.8% on average and ranges from 10% to 20%.