A Tutorial-style Single-cycle Fast Fourier Transform Processor

Abstract

The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is one of the most important algorithms of the past century. It presents a way to compute the discrete Fourier transform with a computational complexity of O(N log2(N)). Its structure also provides an excellent example of the power of custom hardware accelerators. However, current tutorial-style papers implementing the FFT are not well-suited for undergraduate students since they are either too vague on important implementation details or use a pipelined architecture which can obscure important fundamental concepts of the accelerator. This paper presents a simple, single-cycle version of an FFT hardware accelerator that can be implemented on an FPGA and is accompanied with source code to easily simulate and synthesize the design available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6219524.