A Hardware Accelerated Autoencoder for RF Communication Using Short-Time-Fourier- Transform Assisted Convolutional Neural Network

This paper presents a hardware-accelerated autoencoder (AE) for wireless communication using a Short-Time-Fourier-Transform Assisted Convolutional Neural Network (STFT-CNN-AE). The design aims to reduce the autoencoder's resource requirements and power dissipation while maintaining its performance even in low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) wireless channels. The STFT-CNN-AE was implemented and tested on a Zynq UltraScale+ FPGA platform. Prototype measurements show that the STFT-CNN-AE achieves 3.5 times higher throughput at 2.6 times faster frequency, consumes 59% less power, and requires 76% fewer hardware resources (LUT and DSP) compared to a prior Multi-Layer Perceptron-based AE (MLP-AE). These improvements were achieved while maintaining comparable performance in low SNR (<7.5dB) channels.