A low latency and area efficient FFT processor for massive MIMO systems

A low-latency and area-efficient FFT/IFFT scheme is presented. The main idea is to utilize OFDM guard bands to reduce the operation counts and processing time, which results in 42% latency reduction compared to the reported pipelined schemes. To realize this idea, a modified pipelined architecture and an efficient data scheduling scheme are proposed. Furthermore, the proposed architecture is scalable to different FFT sizes and is also reconfigurable to support a wide range of applications. A 2048-point FFT/IFFT processor based on the proposed scheme has been designed, resulting in 1200 clock cycles latency, which can address the low latency demand of massive MIMO systems. Synthesis results in a 28 nm CMOS technology show that proposed design attains a throughput of 1 GS/s when clocked at 500 MHz