In this paper, performance trade-offs between throughput, and energy consumption, in implementation of recursive digital filters are presented. Digit-serial arithmetic with different degree of pipelining are used in the implementions. As a demonstration object, a bireciprocal third-order lattice wave digital filter is used. Simulations with HSPICE show that a maximum throughput is obtained using pipelined processing elements with a digit-size equal to the fractional bits in the filter coefficient. The use of non-pipelined processing elements yields minimum energy consumption. A trade-off between throughput and energy consumption can be made by pipelining only some of the processing elements.