New programmable FFT implementations for radar signal processing

The authors have designed two high-throughput, wide-dynamic-range, real-time FFT processors for use in advanced wide-bandwidth HF radar systems. These FFTs are capable of real-time operation at continuous throughput rates greater than 2 MHz with a programmable transform length of up to 16 K points. Either 32-b fixed-point or 32-b floating-point (IEEE format) computations can be performed. An interesting result is that both FFT design approaches provide approximately the same throughput rate, are approximately the same size (250 ICs), and require less than 100 W of power