Development of a FPGA-based high speed FFT processor for wideband Direction of Arrival applications

A parallel and pipelined Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) processor for use in the Direction of Arrival (DOA) estimation of a wideband waveform is presented. The selected DOA algorithm follows the Coherent Signal Subspace Method (CSSM). The target device for implementation is a Xilinx Virtex-5 Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The FFT processor was developed in MATLAB Simulink using the Xilinx System Generator block-set to auto-generate VHDL code. Although the parallel and pipelined architecture uses a large portion of the available FPGA resources, the architecture does yield a high throughput.