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FIR filters are important building blocks to many DSP applications.They are widely applied to applications of various sample rates such asaudio, video or image signal processing or signal equalization, etc.Due to the wide range of applications, the study on efficientimplementations to fit for the different application requirementsbecomes an interesting topic. In this dissertation, we study this topicby exploring design spaces of FIR filter modules (singlefilter) and filter banks (multiple filters). For exploring the design spaces of a single filter module, weconsider implementations in bit-level reformulation and theirarchitecture implementation issues. Two architectures will be proposed.One is for programmable FIR filters and the other is for fixedcoefficient ones. The programmable one is derived basing on theModified Booth encoding of input signals. It performs filter operationsin digit-serial and is flexibly pipelinable without incurring extra latency. Comparison results showedthat the resulting architecture takes only half the cost withoutsacrificing performance compared with the architecture proposed in theliterature. The fixed coefficient one is a memory-based architecture.Fixed coefficient properties allow us to pre-calculate some requiredoperations in memory to reduce the required numerical operations. Efficientschemes to store, partition and arrange the pre- calculated results are studied.The resulting architecture is a parameterized one such thatthat it can be tuned to fit for different application specificationrequirements by adjusting the values of the parameters. For exploring design spaces of multiple filters, wepropose hardware sharing methods to allow DSP systems withmultiple filters to share one set of hardware to perform requiredcomputations. The hardware-sharing method modifiesa well-designed architecture to make it ready for performing multiplefilterings. The method preserves the topology of original architecture.Hence, if the original architecture features regular or systolic, the sharedarchitecture will also be regular or systolic.The hardware-sharing method will be applied to a typical multirate system:tree-structured QMF banks. The resulting architecture is a highly sharedone. Two silicon implementations will also be presented in thisdissertation. The first one is an IIR filter bank which performs featureextraction for a low cost speech recognition system. In thisimplementation, we applied the proposed hardware- sharing method to aDA-based IIR filter architecture and make it capable of performingmultiple-levels of multirate filter bank operations. The other one is apair of matched filters for a FSK decoder. We applied architectureimplementation issues discussed in this dissertation and sharedthe hardware to only two six-bit counters. Both systems have been provedfunctional in silicons by UMC Tech. Co., LTD and Sunplus Tech. Co., LTD,respectively.
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