Modular VLSI architectures for computing the arithmetic Fourier transform

Modular, area-efficient VLSI architectures for computing the arithmetic Fourier transform (AFT) are proposed. By suitable design of PEs and I/O sequencing, nonuniform data dependencies in the AFT computation which require nonequidistant inputs and assignment of Mobius function values are resolved. The proposed design employs 2N+1 PEs to compute 2N+1 Fourier coefficients. Each PE has an adder and a fixed amount of local storage, and one PE has a multiplier. I/O with the host is performed using a fixed number of channels. This results in simple PE organization, compared with those needed in known DFT/FFT architectures. The design achieves O(N) speedup. It uses significantly fewer PEs than designs in the literature and supports real-time applications by allowing continuous sequential input. It can be extended to achieve linear speedup in a fixed size array with 2p+1 PEs, 1⩽p⩽N