Computer-aided design of VLSI second-order sections

A CAD tool is presented for producing very high throughput IIR filters. The architecture is a cascade of word-parallel, blocked, second-order sections. Because it is application-specific, it is a very high level CAD tool. An engineer only needs to specify 1) the word size W, 2) the block size B; and 3) each second-order section´s coefficients. Using this information, the CAD tool will generate CIF files for a filter system that, operating at 10MHz, can process 5B/W million samples per second. Our purpose is to illustrate the benefits of applying both bit-level array architecture and application-specific CAD to the problem of IIR filtering. The resulting CAD system reduces the costs of very high throughput IIR filters with respect to design, fabrication, and operation.