Several high-level low-power design techniques have been incorporated in the design of a decimation filter for software radio. These include; operation minimization, multiplier elimination and block deactivation. Analysis and simulation results indicate that these techniques can achieve a 4 times reduction in power dissipation. An interleaved multiplier-accumulator array is used in the lowpass filter. The decimation filter designed has a programmable resolution, that varies from 12 to 20 bits. The entire decimation filter has been designed in a 3.3 Volt 0.5 /spl mu/m CMOS technology.