Implementation techniques of high-order FFT into low-cost FPGA

In this paper, our objective is to detail know-how and techniques that can help the designer of electronic circuits to develop and to optimize their own IP in a reasonable time. For this reason, we propose to optimize existing FFT algorithms for low-cost FPGA implementations. For that, we have used short length structures to obtain higher length transforms. Indeed, we can obtain a VLSI structure by using log₄ (N) 4-point FFTs to construct N-point FFT rather than (N/8) log₈ (N) 8-point FFTs. Furthermore, two techniques are used to yield with VLSI architecture. Firstly, the radix-4 FFT is modified to process one sample per clock cycle. Secondly, the memory is shared and divided into 4 parts to reduce the consumed resources and to improve the overall latency. Comparisons with commercial IP cores show that the low area architecture presents the best compromise in terms of speed/area.