Develop FFT apps on low-power MCUs

By Paul Holden,
Embedded Systems Programming
Oct 19 2005 (14:51 PM)

Now that low-power microcontrollers are starting to include peripherals that were formerly the reserve of larger microprocessors, ASICs, or DSPs, you've got new opportunities to compute complex algorithms at low power levels. This article describes a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) application developed using a low-power microcontroller that includes a single-cycle hardware multiplier. The application computes, in real-time, the spectrum of an input voltage (V_IN in Figure 1). To accomplish this, an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) samples V_IN and transfers the sample data to the microcontroller. The microcontroller then performs a 256-point FFT on the samples to obtain the spectrum of the input voltage. For testing purposes, the microcontroller calculates the magnitude of the spectrum and transfers the results to a PC where they are displayed (again in real-time).

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