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.