An In-Place FFT Architecture for Real-Valued Signals

This brief presents a novel scalable architecture for in-place fast Fourier transform (IFFT) computation for real-valued signals. The proposed computation is based on a modified radix-2 algorithm, which removes the redundant operations from the flow graph. A new processing element (PE) is proposed using two radix-2 butterflies that can process four inputs in parallel. A novel conflict-free memory-addressing scheme is proposed to ensure the continuous operation of the FFT processor. Furthermore, the addressing scheme is extended to support multiple parallel PEs. The proposed real-FFT processor simultaneously requires fewer computation cycles and lower hardware cost compared to prior work. For example, the proposed design with two PEs reduces the computation cycles by a factor of 2 for a 256-point real fast Fourier transform (RFFT) compared to a prior work while maintaining a lower hardware complexity. The number of computation cycles is reduced proportionately with the increase in the number of PEs.