Realization of Low Power FIR Digital Filter using Modified DA-based Architecture

Objectives: Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filters are widely used in image and signal processing applications and responsible for more total power dissipation. This research work presents modified Distributed Arithmetic (DA)-based approach for realization of low power FIR digital filter. Methods/Statistical Analysis: Power reduction in modified DA-based filter is achieved by turning off the MOS components whenever the input samples of circuit are zero. The proposed filter reduces power consumption by disabling adder operation when inputs are zero. In the conventional DSP applications, it is observed that the average of the zero input sample is very high. Therefore, substantial reduction in power consumption can be obtained by proposed modified DA-based architecture. The proposed DA-based FIR filter is designed using Xilinx® ISE design tool and Cadence® EDA tool. Findings: The proposed work proved that the power reduction is achieved in modified DA-based FIR filter realization when compared with existing LUT-less DA-based architecture of FIR filter. Simulation results shows that proposed architecture can achieve significant power reduction with fewer percentage increases in area and delay for different architectures. For four tap FIR filter 12.5% power reduction is achieved, at the cost of 0.63% extra chip area and 1% increased delay in comparison with conventional DA-based filter architecture. Therefore, the proposed filter can achieve even greater power saving for higher order FIR filters and for more number of zeros in the inputs sample. The proposed technique can also be used for reconfigurable architectures where filter coefficients change during runtime. Conclusion: A low power modified DA-based FIR digital Filter is proposed. Power reduction in proposed design is due to turning off MOS components and is linearly related to number of zeros in input and order of the filter.