Low power and high-speed implementation of FIR filters for software defined radio receivers

The most computationally intensive part of the wideband receiver of a software defined radio (SDR) is the intermediate frequency (IF) processing block. Digital filtering is the main task in IF processing. The computational complexity of finite impulse response (FIR) filters used in the IF processing block is dominated by the number of adders (subtractors) employed in the multipliers. This paper presents a method to implement FIR filters for SDR receivers using minimum number of adders. We use an arithmetic scheme, known as pseudo floating-point (PFP) representation to encode the filter coefficients. By employing a span reduction technique, we show that the filter coefficients can be coded using considerably fewer bits than conventional 24-bit and 16-bit fixed-point filters. Simulation results show that the magnitude responses of the filters coded in PFP meet the attenuation requirements of wireless communication standard specifications. The proposed method offers average reductions of 40% in the number of adders and 80% in the number of full adders needed for the coefficient multipliers over conventional FIR filter implementation methods.