Estimation of signal transition activity in FIR filters implemented by a MAC architecture

A novel method for the accurate calculation of the transition activity at t he nodes of a multiplier-accumulator (MAC) architecture implementing finite impulse response filters is proposed in this paper. The method is develope d for input signals, which can be described by a stationary Gaussian proces s. The transition activity per bit of a signal word is modeled according to the dual-bit-type (DBT) model and it is described as a function of the sig nal statistics. An efficient analytical method has been developed for the d etermination of the signal statistics at each node of the MAC architecture. It is based on the mathematical formulation of the multiplexing in time of signal sequences with known statistics. The effect of the multiplexing mec hanism on the breakpoints of the DBT model, which influences significantly the accuracy of the method, is also determined. Several experiments both wi th synthetic and real data have been conducted. The numerical results produ ced by the proposed models are in very good agreement with the measured val ues of the transition activity.