John Lillington
RF Engines

The purpose of this paper is to make comparisons between the competing techniques for real-time wideband channelisation including the pipelined FFT, Polyphase DFTs, multiple digital down-converters (DDCs), the Pipelined Frequency Transform (PFT) and its derivative, the Tuneable PFT (TPFT). The main objective is to establish the optimum solution for different application types. Although based on a firm theoretical background, the paper is of a practical nature, giving many real examples which have been designed, placed, routed, and tested in FPGAs. Useful information for the system or design engineer includes silicon-performance trade-offs and memory requirements.