A Natively Fixed-Point Run-Time Reconfigurable FIR Filter Design Method for FPGA Hardware

We present a natively fixed-point filter design method that targets FPGA-based Reconfigurable Finite Impulse Response (RFIR) filters for Software Defined Radio applications. The Filter Designer is capable of reconfiguring cut-off frequencies on-the-fly at run-time; with other parameters, such as filter length and window type, configurable at compile-time. The ability to compute filter coefficients directly on FPGAs is compelling, as much lower latencies can be achieved when compared to RFIRs programmed with embedded processors. In this work we discuss several filter design techniques from the literature and investigate their suitability for implementation on FPGAs. A hybrid method combining window and frequency sampling methods is developed and implemented on a Xilinx Zynq-7000 SoC. We explore the limitations of designing filters in fixed-point arithmetic and consider the effects filter length and wordlength have on filter quality. Results show that the proposed algorithm generates good-quality filters that display stopband attenuation up to 88dB, transition bandwidths less than 1% of the sample rate, and low resource utilisation. Most notably, we found that our method is up to three orders of magnitude faster than an equivalent software implementation, with execution times as low as 2.52
$\mu \text{s}$
, enabling radio applications in which latency is a principal constraint.