A High-Flexible Low-Latency Memory-Based FFT Processor for 4G, WLAN, and Future 5G

A high-throughput programmable fast Fourier transform (FFT) processor is designed supporting 16- to 4096-point FFTs and 12- to 2400-point discrete Fourier transforms (DFTs) for 4G, wireless local area network, and future 5G. A 16-path data parallel memory-based architecture is selected as a tradeoff between throughput and cost. To implement a hardware-efficient high-speed processor, several improvements are provided. To maximally reuse the hardware resource, a reconfigurable butterfly unit is proposed to support computing including eight radix-2 in parallel, four radix-3/4 in parallel, two radix-5/8 in parallel, and a radix-16 in one clock cycle. Twiddle factor multipliers using different schemes are optimized and compared, wherein modified coordinate rotation digital computer scheme is finally implemented to minimize the hardware cost while supporting both FFTs and DFTs. An optimized conflict-free data access scheme is also proposed to support multiple butterflies at any radices. The processor is designed as a general IP and can be implemented using a processor synthesizer (application-specific instruction-set processor designer). The electronic design automation synthesis result based on a 65-nm technology shows that the processor area is 1.46 mm2. The processor supports 972 MS/s 4096-point FFT at 250 MHz with a power consumption of 68.64 mW and a signal-to-quantization-noise ratio of 66.1 dB. The proposed processor has better-normalized throughput per area unit than the state-of-the-art available designs.