Design and implementation of novel FIR filter architecture for efficient signal boundary handling on Xilinx Virtex FPGAs

This paper presents the design and detailed implementation of a novel architecture proposed by the authors for FIR filters on Xilinx Virtex FPGAs. The architecture is particularly useful for handling the problem of signal boundaries filtering, which occurs in finite length signal processing (e.g. image processing). The key to that is a clever exploitation of the shift register logic (SRL16) component of the Virtex family. The implementation leads to considerable area savings compared to the conventional implementation (based on a hard router) with no speed penalty. This work completes that first appearing in A. Benkrid, et al. (2003).