Design Space Exploration of 1-D FFT Processor

A design space exploration methodology of 1-D FFT processor is proposed to find the best hardware architecture in a quantitative way during early design. The methodology includes architecture candidate collection, coarse-grained architecture selection, and circuit level design optimizations. We show how to select a better architecture from candidates including different architectures (SDF, SDC, MDF, MDC and memory-based) with different degree of parallelism at different radices. The sub-level designs, including designs of rotator and data scaling module, are introduced for further optimizations. As a proof of concept, an FFT processor for 4G, WLAN and future 5G is designed supporting 16-4096 and 12-2400 point FFTs. Memory-based architecture with 16-datapath mixed-radix butterfly unit is selected to satisfy the demands for 1GS/s (4096) throughput. The synthesis result based on 65nm technology shows that the silicon cost and power consumption are 1.46mm2 and 68.64mW respectively. The proposed processor has better normalized throughput per area unit and normalized FFTs per energy unit than the state of the art available designs.