A Computationally Efficient Halfband FIR Filter Bank for Hearing Aids

Digital Finite Impulse Response (FIR) Filter bank is one of the most significant parts in Digital Signal Processing (DSP) applications. Designing and implementation of filter bank is a challenging task in Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) Circuits in terms of power, area and speed. The multipliers and adders are the major key blocks of the filter bank which consumes high power, more area and needs high computation time. In this project, an efficient FIR filter bank is designed based on the Sub-band coding technique. In this proposed filter bank design, there are 10 filters which are designed using two prototype halfband FIR filters and each filter has 5 taps, so that the order of each filter in the filter bank structure is 4. This proposed filter bank will split the given input audio signal into six sub-band signals based on its frequency which is mostly used in hearing aids for audiogram matching. In hearing aids, the frequencies of the audio signal are split into different bands and then ampli�cation is provided according to the different levels of hearing threshold which is called audiogram matching. To improve the performance of this filter bank, Pipelined Floating Arithmetic has been used.