  Matched filtering is used to search for gravitational waves emitted by
inspiralling compact binaries in data from the ground-based interferometers.
One of the key aspects of the detection process is the design of a template
bank that covers the astrophysically pertinent parameter space. In an earlier
paper, we described a template bank that is based on a square lattice. Although
robust, we showed that the square placement is over-efficient, with the
implication that it is computationally more demanding than required. In this
paper, we present a template bank based on an hexagonal lattice, which size is
reduced by 40% with respect to the proposed square placement. We describe the
practical aspects of the hexagonal template bank implementation, its size, and
computational cost. We have also performed exhaustive simulations to
characterize its efficiency and safeness. We show that the bank is adequate to
search for a wide variety of binary systems (primordial black holes, neutron
stars and stellar mass black holes) and in data from both current detectors
(initial LIGO, Virgo and GEO600) as well as future detectors (advanced LIGO and
EGO). Remarkably, although our template bank placement uses a metric arising
from a particular template family, namely stationary phase approximation, we
show that it can be used successfully with other template families (e.g., Pade
resummation and effective one-body approximation). This quality of being
effective for different template families makes the proposed bank suitable for
a search that would use several of them in parallel (e.g., in a binary black
hole search). The hexagonal template bank described in this paper is currently
used to search for non-spinning inspiralling compact binaries in data from the
Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).
