The Architectural Optimizations of a Low-Complexity and Low-Latency FFT Processor for MIMO-OFDM Communication Systems

Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) processor is a paramount signal processing component in MIMO-OFDM wireless communication systems. Furthermore, novel applications introduced in 5G incur much more rigorous requirements for FFT designs including complexity, latency, and re-configurability. This paper presents the VLSI architecture design and circuit implementation of a FFT processor that is jointly optimized for low-latency, low-complexity, and configurability. Specifically, the proposed architecture processes two data streams concurrently and supports power-of-two FFT sizes from 64 to 2048 symbols. Moreover, a novel data-processing sequence is presented so that data streams are processed in a time-multiplexing manner and an efficient hardware-sharing architecture can be designed. In addition, a highly efficient I/O reorder mechanism is proposed so that the memory elements are shared between processing stages and the efficiency for utilizing memory components is enhanced. Based on the architectural optimizations, two FFT processors are realized. The ultra-low latency design achieves a latency of 4 μs with 41% area reduction compared to the comparable designs. On the other hand, the ultra-low complexity structure achieves a latency of 25 μs with 24% area reduction compared to the state-of-the-art implementations.