Automatic generation of customized discrete Fourier transform IPs

This paper presents a parameterized soft core generator for the discrete Fourier transform (DFT). Reusable IPs of digital signal processing (DSP) kernels are important time-saving resources in DSP hardware development. Unfortunately, reusable IPs, however optimized, could introduce inefficiencies because they cannot fit the exact requirements of every application context. Given the well-understood and regular computation in DSP kernels, an automatic tool could generate high-quality ready-to-use IPs customized to user-specified cost/performance tradeoffs (beyond basic parameters such as input size and data format). The paper shows that the generated DFT cores could match closely the performance and cost of DFT cores from the Xilinx LogiCore library. Furthermore, the generator could yield DFT cores over a range of different performance/cost tradeoff points that are not available from the library.