On the design of a real time modular FFT processor

Abstract

This article describes the implementation of a modular fast Fourier transform (FFT) processor for real-input applications. The nature of the signal has been exploited to reduce to a minimum the number of multiplications and the calculations are performed in an ordered sequence in order to evaluate only the nonredundant terms at each pass. The number of components required for transforming <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">N</tex> points is given as a unction of the number of passes. A processing rate of one point per clock cycle at frequencies up to 10 MHz is realizable making the processor ideally suited for a number of real time computations.