Parallel-Pipeline Fast Walsh-Hadamard Transform Implementation Using HLS

Abstract

Walsh Hadamard Transform (WHT) is an orthogonal, symmetric, involutional, and linear operation used in data encryption, data compression, and quantum computing. The WHT belongs to a generalized class of Fourier transforms, which allows that many algorithms developed for the fast Fourier transform (FFT) work for fast WHT implementations (FWHT). This paper employs this property and uses a parallel-pipeline FFT well-known strategy for VLSI implementation to build parallel-pipeline architectures for FWHT. We apply the FFT parallel-pipeline approach on a Fast WHT and use the High-Level Synthesis (HLS) tool from Xilinx Vitis to generate an FPGA solution. We also provide an open-source code with the basic blocks to build any model with any parallelization level. The parallel-pipeline proposed solutions achieve a latency reduction of up to 3.57% compared to a pipeline approach on a 256-long signal using 32 bit floating-point numbers.