Low-power constant-coefficient FIR filtering in a hearing aid application

A new constant-coefficient FIR filter architecture is hereby presented, specifically designed for a VLSI adaptive directional microphone for hearing aids. Gate-level simulations targeting a 0.25 mum process point out relevant power savings compared to both the fully time-shared reference design (-80%) and a recently published low-power circuit (-32%), with a limited 11% area overhead compared to the latter one