Scalability of Programmable FIR Digital Filters

Previous designs of programmable FIR digital filters have demonstrated that the use of broadcast data and control can lead to a high performance-to-cost ratio. As the technology advances to the deep sub-micrometer regime, such an approach should be re-examined by taking the effect of interconnections into account. In this paper, we show that the contribution of interconnect delay to the cycle time is no longer negligible and will hamper the scalability of such broadcast designs. Further speed and density improvements through scaling can be secured by the fully pipelined design in which both data and control signals are restricted to local connections.