FFT Acceleration in a NAND Flash Memory

FFT is utilized in a wide range of spectrum analysis applications. As the data volume dramatically increases in multi-sensor or wideband RF systems, advances in FFT acceleration are required to realize a high-performance back-end digital signal processing unit. A million-point FFT accelerator that is feasible for a single-chip solution is introduced here using an in-memory technique in a NAND flash memory. The million-point FFT accelerator is developed using a compact SONOS NAND flash model with a Gaussian noise distribution. With a 1-bit memory depth, SQNR reaches approximately 110dB. It is comparable to conventional accelerators using FPGAs with a 20-bit twiddle factor and 32-bit output word length, which will be references for the realization of a single-chip solution.