With the advent of deep submicron very large scale integration technology,
the integration of a large fast-Fourier-transform (FFT) network into a sing
le chip is becoming possible. However, a practical FFT chip is normally ver
y big, so effective testing and fault-tolerance techniques usually are requ
ired, In this paper, we first propose a C-testable FFT network design. Only
20 test patterns are required to cover all combinational single-cell fault
s and interconnect stuck-at and break faults for the FFT network, regardles
s of its size. A spare-row based fault-tolerant FFT network design is subse
quently proposed. Compared with previous works, our approach shows higher r
eliability and lower hardware overhead, and only three bit-level cell types
are needed for repairing a faulty row in the multiply-subtract-add module.
Also, special cell design is not required to implement the reconfiguration
scheme. The hardware overhead for the testable design is low-about 4% for
16-bit numbers, regardless of the FFT network size.