An area-efficient 256-point FFT design for WiMAX systems

This paper presents a low area 256-point pipelined FFT architecture, especially for IEEE 802.16a WiMAX systems. Radix-24 algorithm and single-path delay feedback (SDF) architecture are adopted in the design to reduce the complexity of twiddle factor multiplication. A new cascade canonical signed digit (CSD) complex multipliers are proposed for twiddle factor multiplication, which has lower area and less power consumption than conventional complex multipliers composed of 4 multipliers and 2 adders. Also, the proposed cascade CSD multipliers can remove look-up table for storing coefficient of twiddle factors. In hardware implementation with Cyclone 10LP FPGA, it is shown that the proposed FFT design method achieves about 62% reduction in gate count and 64% memory reduction compared with the previous schemes.