Implementing High-Order FIR Filters in FPGAs

Abstract: Contemporary field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are predestined for the application of finite impulse response (FIR) filters. Their embedded digital signal processing (DSP) blocks for multiply-accumulate operations enable efficient fixed-point computations, in cases where the filter structure is accurately mapped to the dedicated hardware architecture. This brief presents a generic systolic structure for high-order FIR filters, efficiently exploiting the hardware resources of an FPGA in terms of routability and timing. Although this seems to be an easily implementable task, the synthesizing tools require an adaptation of the straightforward digital filter implementation for an optimal mapping. Using the example of a symmetric FIR filter with 90 taps, we demonstrate the performance of the proposed structure with FPGAs from Xilinx and Altera. The implementation utilizes less than 1% of slice logic and runs at clock frequencies up to 526 MHz. Moreover, an enhancement of the structure ultimately provides an extended dynamic range for the quantized coefficients without the costs of additional slice logic.