Previous designs of programmable finite impulse response (FIR) digital filters have demonstrated that the use of broadcast input data and control can lead to a high performance-to-cost ratio. As the technology moves into deeper submicron regimes, this approach should be reexamined by paying greater attention to the effect of interconnects. In this paper, we quantify the contribution of interconnect delay to the cycle time and demonstrate its negative effects on both scalability and cost-effectiveness of such broadcast designs. We further show how speed and density improvements secured through technology scaling can be maintained by a fully pipelined design in which both data and control signals are restricted to local connections. One important feature of our design is that the data input port is reused for delivering the new coefficients. Consequently, coefficients can be loaded in bit-parallel form with no increase in the number of input pins, thereby facilitating and speeding up run-time adaptation to the application environment. Another feature is that variable-precision coefficients can be accommodated easily and flexibly, with no speed penalty. Because the inner-product computation at the heart of a FIR filter occurs in many other signal processing applications, our design methods and conclusions are widely applicable to the design of application-specific and embedded parallel architectures.