Design of a mixed prime factor FFT for portable digital radio mondiale receiver

To achieve better sound quality and to improve data reception, digital radio mondiale (DRM) offers a worldwide initiative to bring analog amplitude modulation (AM) radio into the digital era. DRM systems use coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (COFDM) modulation with a multilevel coding scheme to get high resistance to the multipath padding and interference. The bandwidth of a DRM passband signal is less than 20 kHz and the number of carriers used in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation is relatively small. For this reason, DRM systems use non-power-of-two Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT) for OFDM demodulation, such processing gives way to more speed and power consumption in critical paths in DRM receivers. In this paper, we propose a mixed radix-2ⁿ and prime factor FFT algorithm for portable DRM receivers. Using the proposed architecture, we can reduce the processing time and energy consumption compared to conventional digital signal processor (DSP) based DRM receivers.