FFT and IMDCT circuit sharing in DAB receiver

This paper proposes a circuit-sharing approach to improve efficiency for the key digital audio broadcasting (DAB) techniques, i.e., MPEG1-audio decoding and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). Because OFDM´s fast Fourier transform (FFT) requires heavy computational power for implementation, a single butterfly processing element (BPE) is adopted to reduce the chip area required for FFT. Furthermore, by modifying the BPE logical combinational circuit, both IMDCT (inverse modified discrete cosine transform) and FFT functions can be obtained simultaneously from a single VLSI chip. Therefore, the proposed technique reduces hardware overhead, enhances circuit efficiency and significantly reduces the cost of DAB receivers. The proposed circuit is simulated as a VLSI prototype chip using a 0.35 μm CMOS process, with a chip area of about 22.09 mm² and a total gate count of approximately 10839 (excluding ROM and RAM).