Dynamic Partial Reconfigurable FFT for OFDM Based Communication Systems

This paper presents a novel scalable and runtime dynamically reconfigurable FFT architecture for different wireless standards. With only 8 butterfly units, a reconfigurable FFT architecture for three different FFT points is realized using mixed radix-22/23/24 FFT algorithm in a modified Single-path Delay Feedback (SDF) pipelined architecture. Via a proper data flow reconfiguration it can support 64, 128 and 256. It can even be extended up to 8192-point transforms and uses only 13 butterfly units to realize 8192 points. This paper describes the implementation method of 256 and 128 point FFT, which is reconfigured partially from 64 point FFT. The whole system is implemented on a Xilinx XC2VP30 FPGA device. The implementation design addresses area efficiency and flexibility allowing the insertion of the partial modules dynamically to realize various FFT sizes. To verify the efficacy of this dynamic partial reconfigurable FFT design method, a conventional multiplexer based reconfigurable architecture was designed and tested on the same platform. Tested FPGA results for the Dynamic Partial Reconfigurable (DPR) method show the configuration time improvement and good area efficiency as compared to the reconfigurable architecture using conventional multiplexer techniques.