A high-speed FFT based on a six-step algorithm: Applied to a radio telescope for a solar radio burst

A radio telescope analyzes the radio frequency (RF) received from celestial objects. It consists of an antenna, a receiver, and a spectrometer. The spectrometer converts the time domain into the frequency domain with an FFT operation. A solar radio burst observation requires a high-speed FFT. This paper proposes a P parallel N point FFT for fixed point data based on a six-step algorithm. We analyze the hardware resources for the P parallel N point FFT. We implemented 32 parallel N point FFT circuits on a Xilinx Virtex 7 VC707 board. Comparison with the existing FFT implementations shows that the proposed one is 4.52-22.64 times faster.