Energy efficient VLSI architecture of real-valued serial pipelined FFT

This study presents an energy-efficient serial pipelined architecture of fast Fourier transform (FFT) to process real-valued signals. A new data mapping scheme is presented to obtain a normal order input-output without the requirement of a post-processing stage. It facilitates reduction in the computational workload on the hardware resources which is confirmed through mathematical derivations. Further, the proposed design involves a novel quadrant multiplier with relatively lower hardware complexity. It performs the quarter operation of a complex multiplier in one clock cycle, and thereby consumes relatively lower power. Moreover, in the last stage, a merged unit for butterfly computation and data re-ordering is also proposed which performs either a half-butterfly operation or interchanges data, and thereby reduces the hardware usage. Application specific integrated circuit synthesis and field programmable gate array results show that for a 1024-points FFT computation, the proposed architecture offers 10.26% savings in area, 20.83% savings in power, 16.98% savings in area-delay product and 26.76% savings in energy-per-sample, 7.79% savings in sliced look-up tables, and 11.93% savings in flip-flops over the best existing design.