Multi-mode parallel and folded VLSI architectures for 1D-fast Fourier transform

•This paper proposes the following FFT architectures.•Proposed folded requires less cycles than SDF/MDC.•Proposed radix-k N-point parallel FFT is designed by one N/K point FFT.•Proposed radix-2 16-point parallel achieves 60.3% of area reduction than existing.

The modern real time applications like orthogonal frequency division multiplexing and etc., demand high performance fast Fourier transform (FFT) design with less area and clock cycles. This paper proposes efficient FFT VLSI architectures using folded/parallel implementation. In the proposed folded FFT architecture, the number of cycles required to complete the operation is less than single path delay feedback (SDF)/multi-path delay commutator (MDC) architectures. In the proposed parallel FFT architecture, N-point FFT is implemented by using one N/2-point FFT without much extra hardware. Both the proposed architectures are implemented for radix-2, 22, and 4 using 45 nm technology library. The proposed parallel architecture achieves 56.7% and 40.6% of area reduction as compared with the existing parallel architecture based 16-point radix-2 and radix-22 DIF FFTs respectively. The proposed folded architecture achieves 65.5%, 51.1%, and 35.8% of worst path delay reduction as compared with the existing SDF based 16-point radix-2, radix-22, and radix-4 DIF FFTs respectively.