This paper shows the development of a 1024-point radix-4 FFT VHDL core for applications in hardware signal processing, targeting low-cost FPGA technologies. The developed core is targeted into a Xilinx廬 Spartan鈩?3 XC3S200 FPGA with the inclusion of a VGA display interface and an external 16-bit data acquisition system for performance evaluation purposes. Several tests were performed in order to verify FFT core functionality, besides the time performance analysis highlights the core advantages over commercially available DSPs and Pentium-based PCs. The core is compared with similar third party IP cores targeting resourceful FPGA technologies. The novelty of this work is to provide a lowcost, resource efficient core for spectrum analysis applications.
