Automatic generation of hardware FIR filters from a frequency domain specification

This article presents an open-source tool for the automatic design of reliable finite impulse response (FIR) filters, targeting FPGAs. It shows that user intervention can be limited to a very small number of relevant input parameters: a high-level frequency-domain specification, and input/output formats. All the other design parameters are computed automatically, using novel approaches to filter coefficient quantization and direct-form architecture implementation. Our tool guarantees a priori that the resulting architecture respects the specification while attempting to minimize its cost. Our approach is evaluated on a range of examples and shown to produce designs that are very competitive with the state of the art, with very little design effort.