FFT Implementation with Fused Floating-Point Operations

This paper describes two fused floating-point operations and applies them to the implementation of fast Fourier transform (FFT) processors. The fused operations are a two-term dot product and an add-subtract unit. The FFT processors use "butterfly” operations that consist of multiplications, additions, and subtractions of complex valued data. Both radix-2 and radix-4 butterflies are implemented efficiently with the two fused floating-point operations. When placed and routed using a high performance standard cell technology, the fused FFT butterflies are about 15 percent faster and 30 percent smaller than a conventional implementation. Also the numerical results of the fused implementations are slightly more accurate, since they use fewer rounding operations.