Energy-efficient and parameterized designs for fast Fourier transform on FPGAs

In this paper, we develop energy efficient designs for the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) on FPGAs. Architectures for FFT on FPGAs are designed by investigating and applying techniques for minimizing the energy dissipation. Architectural parameters such as degrees of vertical and horizontal parallelism are identified and a design domain is created through a combination of design choices. We determine design trade-offs using high-level performance estimation to obtain energy-efficient designs. We implemented a set of parametrized designs having parallelism, radix and choice of storage types as parameters, on Xilinx Virtex-II FPGA to verify the estimates. Our designs dissipate 57% to 78% less energy than the optimized designs from the Xilinx library. In terms of a comprehensive metric such as EAT (Energy-Area-Time), our designs offer performance improvements of 3-13x over the Xilinx designs.