Building Custom FIR Filters Using System Generator

System Generator is a high level design tool well suited to creating custom DSP data paths in FPGAs. While providing a high level abstraction of an FPGA circuit, it can be used to build designs comparable to hand crafted implementations in terms of area and performance. In this paper we use a MAC-based FIR filter design example to demonstrate the interplay between mathematical abstraction and hardware-centric considerations enabled by System Generator. We demonstrate how an algorithm can be efficiently mapped onto FPGA resources and present the hardware results of several System Generator FIR filter implementations.