A reconfigurable architecture for the FFT operator in a software radio context

The "software radio (SWR)" concept has become a topic of widespread interest for reconfigurable mobile architecture design. It is seen as the next evolutionary step in the mobile communications. In this context of SWR, a way to decrease the runtime of the software reconfiguration and to optimize the sharing between the software and the hardware of the execution platform called "parametrization" was introduced. This technique is based on two approaches, the first one is called the common function approach, the second one is called the common operator approach. Being interested on the second parametrization technique, we propose in this paper a reconfigurable FFT (fast Fourier transform) operator. This operator can be reconfigured to switch from an operator dedicated to compute the FFT in the complex field (i.e for OFDM modulation or frequential equalization) to an operator which computes the FFT in the Galois field in order to perform Reed-Solomon (RS) encoding and two steps of the decoding process