Performance of fixed-point FFT´s: Rounding and scaling considerations

The calculation of the discrete Fourier transform using a fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithm with fixed-point arithmetic is considered. The input data is scaled to prevent overflow and to maintain accuracy. The implementation uses 16-bit fixed-point representation for the data and provides for double precision accumulation of sums and products. Algorithm variants as well as different rounding options are compared. Execution times for implementations based on a single chip signal processor are given. These show that a considerable increase in accuracy can be obtained with only a small penalty in execution time, by applying an alternating form of rounding rather than truncation.