A Serial Commutator Fast Fourier Transform Architecture for Real-Valued Signals

This brief presents a novel pipelined architecture to compute the fast Fourier transform of real input signals in a serial manner, i.e., one sample is processed per cycle. The proposed architecture, referred to as real-valued serial commutator, achieves full hardware utilization by mapping each stage of the fast Fourier transform (FFT) to a half-butterfly operation that operates on real input signals. Prior serial architectures to compute FFT of real signals only achieved 50% hardware utilization. Novel data-exchange and data-reordering circuits are also presented. The complete serial commutator architecture requires 2 log
₂
N - 2 real adders, log
₂
N - 2 real multipliers, and N + 9 log
₂
N - 19 real delay elements, where N represents the size of the FFT.