Hardware architecture and VLSI implementation of a low-power high-performance polyphase channelizer with applications to subband adaptive filtering

The polyphase channelizer is an important component of a subband adaptive filtering system. This paper presents an efficient hardware architecture and VLSI implementation of a low-power high-performance polyphase channelizer, integrating optimizations at algorithmic, architectural and circuit level. At the algorithm level, a computationally efficient structure is derived. Tradeoffs between hardware complexity and system performance are explored during the fixed-point modeling of the system. A computational complexity reduction technique is also employed to reduce the complexity of the hardware architecture. Circuit-level optimizations, including an efficient commutator implementation, dual-VDD scheme and novel level-converting flip-flops, are also integrated. Simulation results show that the design consumes 352 mW power with system throughput of 480 million samples per second (MSPS). A test chip has been submitted for fabrication to validate the proposed hardware architecture and VLSI design techniques.