Computer-aided design of VLSI FIR filters

A CAD tool is presented for producing very high-throughput FIR filters. Because the CAD tool is application-specific, it is a very high-level tool. An engineer only needs to specify 1) the filter order, N; 2) the input word size; and 3) the output word size. Using this information, the CAD tool generates CIF files for a filter system that can process 10N million samples per second. The purpose of the paper is to illustrate the benefits of applying both bit-level systolic array architecture and application-specific CAD to the problem of FIR filtering. The resulting CAD system reduces the costs of very high-throughput FIR filters with respect to design, fabrication, and operation.