An Environment for Design and Implementation of Energy Efficient Digital Filters

This paper presents an overview of a design environment for digital filters. We discuss ongoing work as well as previously developed parts of the design flow. The purpose with this design environment is to improve the design efficiency and thereby be able to increase the knowledge in the area of design and implementation of energy efficient digital filters. The design environment includes all design steps required from the filter design downto a physical implementation. The main bottlenecks in the design flow are the filter design, the development of a bit-level design, and the final mapping to a physical layout. By developing efficient optimization methods for the filter design, software generators for VHDL descriptions of a filter implementation, and layout generators for the physical layout, the time required for going from the filter specification to a filter implementation can be reduced significantly, compared to a conventional design flow.