ASC-FFT: Area-Efficient Low-Latency FFT Design Based on Asynchronous Stochastic Computing

Asynchronous Stochastic Computing (ASC) is a new paradigm that addresses Synchronous Stochastic Computing (SSC) drawbacks, expensive stochastic number generation (SNG) and long latency, by using continuous time streams (CTS). To go beyond the basic operations of addition and multiplication in ASC we need to incorporate a memory element. Although for SSC the natural memory element is a clocked-flip-flop, using the same approach with no synchronized data leads to unacceptable large error. In this paper, we propose to use a capacitor embedded in a feedback loop as the ASC memory element. Based on this idea, we design a low-error asynchronous adder that stores the carry information in the capacitor. Our adder enables the implementation of more complex computation logic. As an example, we implement an asynchronous stochastic Fast Fourier Transform (ASC-FFT) using a FinFET1X¹ technology. The proposed adder requires 76%-24% less hardware cost compared against conventional and SSC adders respectively. Besides, the ASC-FFT shows 3X less latency when compared with SSC-FFT approaches and significant improvements in latency and area over conventional FFT architectures with no degradation of the computation accuracy measured by the FFT Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR).