Wireless communication is becoming the next technological revolution that will connect people anytime and anywhere. The need for developing handheld devices that support any standard and make efficient use of battery energy is becoming one of the most important goals of future communication systems.

An efficient multistandard architecture for digital front-end communication systems has been proposed. This architecture is efficient because it requires a reduced number of stages and multiple common blocks between communication standards. Different filter structures are used to reduce the complexity involved. The implementation of digital filters on the multistage structure includes complex operations such the multiplication. This operation is power, area, and time consuming. Additionally, the filter coefficients require storage area. Memory is the most demanding block in terms of area and power. Moreover, fetching the set of coefficients to perform filtering is also power consuming. Consequently, two different architectures are proposed to reduce complexity, replacing multiplication by structures that use only addition. Moreover, these structures will not need to store coefficients nor fetch them from memory, making the architectures efficient in terms of power consumption and area.

The proposed digital front-end design considers the behavior from processing blocks that perform adaptations such as ADCs and modulation processing. This consideration allows for obtaining an integrated design that adapts to the application and to the internal processing blocks.