Generating FPGA-accelerated DFT libraries

We present a domain-specific approach to generate high-performance hardware-software partitioned implementations of the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) in fixed point precision. The partitioning strategy is a heuristic based on the DFT's divide-and-conquer algorithmic structure and fine tuned by the feedback-driven exploration of candidate designs. We have integrated this approach in the Spiral linear-transform code-generation framework to support push-button automatic implementation. We present evaluations of hardware-software DFT implementations running on the embedded PowerPC processor and the reconfigurable fabric of the Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA. In our experiments, the 1D and 2D DFT's FPGA-accelerated libraries exhibit between 2 and 7.5 times higher performance (operations per second) and up to 2.5 times better energy efficiency (operations per Joule) than the software-only version.