A method for accelerating the design of optimal linear-phase FIR digital filters

A simple method is presented for reducing the execution time of the McClellan-Parks-Rabiner (1973) FIR (finite impulse response) digital filter design program on computers with a floating-point processor. It is found that 80% to 90% of the execution time of this program involves only four lines of the program code. By efficiently implementing these four lines of code in assembly language it is possible to significantly reduce the execution time. Examples of this method are given for personal computers based on both 8086-family and 68000-family microprocessors with a corresponding math coprocessor. It is found that for these computers the method reduces execution time by a factor of 1.6 to 1.9