Reliability improved, high performance FIR filter design using new computation sharing multiplier: suitable for signal processing applications

The finite impulse response (FIR) filter are class of digital filter are extensively used in signal processing and in communication system applications such as noise reduction, echo cancellation and image enhancement etc. Designing a FIR filter with less computation time, low power and by using minimum hardware playing a major role in overall performance of the application where FIR filter is involved. The research work presented in this paper has been carried out to fulfil the above said aim. In this research work, 16 tap FIR filter has been implemented using newly proposed floating point Computation Sharing High Speed Multiplier (CSHM). Since in FIR filter, floating point multiplication is involved in each and every tap of filter operation, bringing the floating point multiplication architecture with less computation time, low power and with minimum hardware will automatically improve the performance of FIR filter. The newly proposed computation sharing multiplier differs from existing computation sharing multiplier with respect to fixed alphabet entries in a precomputer unit and efficient computation of distributed arithmetic based vector scalar product. Front end and backend design of a 16 tap FIR filter using newly proposed CSHM and existing CSHM has been carried out using Cadence^® nclaunch^®, RC^® and Encounter^® tool with tsmc 180 nm technology library. Comparison result of 16 tap FIR filter shows that 18% reduction in chip power, 13% reduction in chip area and 26% reduction in cell count has been achieved with newly proposed floating point CSHM compare to 16 tap FIR filter designed with existing CHSM. This research work also proposes efficient automation algorithms which improve the design for manufacturability (DFM) of a post layout of a 16 tap FIR filter designed which will improve the reliability of integrated circuits. There are many DFM guidelines have to be followed during layout design. In this research work, the automation algorithm has been proposed for one of the DFM guideline called VIA-Redundancy. The aim of this automation algorithm is to replacing single VIA with double VIA wherever possible. In case of “L” transition routing, single contacts can be very sensitive to resistivity spread and defect. The probability to have too resistive transition will be very much minimized by inserting a new contact which reduces electro-migration effect. Through this automation algorithm redundancy percentage of all the VIA’s of FIR filter designed has been increased without compromising chip area, power and computation time much. The specialty of this automated algorithm is that this can be used to any design which has been implemented on the same platform and technology node. The proposed algorithm automated through Tcl 8.6, UNIX platform.