A 512-point 8-parallel pipelined feedforward FFT for WPAN

This paper presents a 512-point feedforward FFT architecture for wireless personal area network (WPAN). The architecture processes a continuous flow of 8 samples in parallel, leading to a throughput of 2.64 GSamples/s. The FFT is computed in three stages that use radix-8 butterflies. This radix reduces significantly the number of rotators with respect to previous approaches based on radix-2. Besides, the proposed architecture uses the minimum memory that is required for a 512-point 8-parallel FFT. Experimental results show that besides its high throughput, the design is efficient in area and power consumption, improving the results of previous approaches. Specifically, for a wordlength of 16 bits, the proposed design consumes 61.5 mW and its area is 1.43 mm².