F.A.S.T. FIR filter synthesis

We present an architectural synthesizer that produces highly optimized designs from system level specifications while requiring little operator effort or knowledge of digital design techniques. With the initial application of the synthesizer limited to digital finite impulse response (FlR) filters, the synthesizer automatically optimizes both the architecture and filter coefficients, giving results competitive with the best efforts of human designers and other high level tools. We also present a near-optimal and eminently practical algorithm for subexpression sharing in hardware multipliers.