A new approach to pipeline FFT processor

A new VLSI architecture for a real-time pipeline FFT processor is proposed. A hardware-oriented radix-2² algorithm is derived by integrating a twiddle factor decomposition technique in the divide-and-conquer approach. The radix-2² algorithm has the same multiplicative complexity as the radix-4 algorithm, but retains the butterfly structure of the radix-2 algorithm. The single-path delay-feedback architecture is used to exploit the spatial regularity in the signal flow graph of the algorithm. For length-N DFT computation, the hardware requirement of the proposed architecture is minimal on both dominant components: log₄N-1 complexity multipliers and N-1 complexity data memory. The validity and efficiency of the architecture have been verified by simulation in the hardware description language VHDL