Area-Efficient Pipelined FFT Processor for Zero-Padded Signals

This paper proposes an area-efficient fast Fourier transform (FFT) processor for zero-padded signals based on the radix-2 ${}^2$ and the radix-2 ${}^3$ single-path delay feedback pipeline architectures. The delay elements for aligning the data in the pipeline stage are one of the most complex units and that of stage 1 is the biggest. By exploiting the fact that the input data sequence is zero-padded and that the twiddle factor multiplication in stage 1 is trivial, the proposed FFT processor can dramatically reduce the required number of delay elements. Moreover, the 256-point FFT processors were designed using hardware description language (HDL) and were synthesized to gate-level circuits using a standard cell library for 65 nm CMOS process. The proposed architecture results in a logic gate count of 40,396, which can be efficient and suitable for zero-padded FFT processors. View Full-Text