Power Consumption Models for Decimation FIR Filters in Multistandard Receivers

Decimation filters are widely used in communication-embedded systems. In fact, decimation filters are useful for implementing channel filtering or selection with low-computation complexity requirements. Many multistandard receiver designs that are required in ubiquitous embedded systems are based on a cascade of decimation filter processing. Filter number and implementation architectures have a significant impact on system performances, such as computation complexity, area, throughput, and power consumption. In this work, we present filter power consumption estimation models for FIR filters. Power consumption models were obtained from a large number of FIR filter syntheses using a direct form. Several curves that estimate power consumption were extracted from these synthesis results. Then, we have evaluated the impact of polyphase decomposition on power consumption of FIR filter and compared it with the direct form results. Some tips regarding power consumption were deduced for the polyphase implementation form. The aim of this work is to help a system designer to select an efficient implementation for FIR in terms of power consumption without having to implement and synthesize the different possible solutions. The proposed method is applied for STMicroelectronics libraries 90 nm and 65 nm low power then validated with a use case of multistandard receiver designing.