A Synthesis Tool for Power-Efficient Base-Band Filter Design

A baseband filter synthesizer that takes a behavioural description of the design and produces an efficient transistor level implementation is presented. The tool optimizes the filter at the cascade level, providing the best trade-off between power consumption and dynamic range, and at the cell level, selecting minimum power solutions, through accurate analytical models and an efficient bi-quad topology. Differently from past cascade design techniques based on dynamic range optimization through linear programming, we focus on power minimization while guaranteeing minimum performance levels, given the increasing importance of power savings in hand-held devices. A synthesized filter has been realized in silicon demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach