Expandable MDC-based FFT architecture and its generator for high-performance applications

Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) cores are extensively used in digital signal processing (DSP) applications like communication systems. Many pipelined FFT architectures optimized for different objectives have been proposed in past few decades. Though a fixed pipelined FFT architecture can generally provide good throughput at reasonable hardware cost, it may still fail to meet the performance demand for throughput-hungry design cases. In this paper, we propose an expandable MDC-based FFT architecture as well as the corresponding hardware design generator, which is capable of automatically producing an FFT core under a given throughput constraint. The experimental results show that the proposed methodology can generate smaller and power-efficient implementations than the existing foldable MDC-based FFT architecture.