HIGH THROUGHPUT FILTER ARCHITECTURE FOR OPTIMAL FPGA-BASED IMPLEMENTATIONS

Abstract

Modern field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) offer built in support for efficient implementation of signal processing algorithms in the form of specialized embedded blocks such as high speed carry chains, specialized shift registers, adders, multiply accumulators (MAC) and block memories. These dedicated elements provide increased computational power and are used for efficient implementation of computationally extensive algorithms. This paper proposes a novel algorithm and architecture for the design and implementation of high performance intermediate frequency (IF) filters on FPGAs. In this research, we have proposed innovative design methodologies for generation of optimal feed forward and recursive architectures to be mapped on a family of FPGAs. Keeping in perspective the limited number of registers within the embedded blocks, the new methodology applies transformations to achieve higher throughput by applying various optimizations to the design algorithm. Implementation options include systolic MAC, transpose direct form MAC, canonic signed digit and distributed arithmetic based filters to suite the most economical FPGA implementation. The paper demonstrates the methodology and shows its applicability by synthesizing the designs and comparing the results to a number of traditional architectures and intellectual property cores. Using Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA, our results show a throughput improvement between 7% and 30% with an average improvement of 16% over traditional implementations of these designs.