Parallel-Pipeline Fast Walsh-Hadamard Transform Implementation Using HLS

Walsh Hadamard Transform (WHT) is an orthogonal, symmetric, involutional, and linear operation used in data encryption, data compression, and quantum computing. The WHT belongs to a generalized class of Fourier transforms, which allows that many algorithms developed for the fast Fourier transform (FFT) work for fast WHT implementations (FWHT). This paper employs this property and uses a parallel-pipeline FFT well-known strategy for VLSI implementation to build parallel-pipeline architectures for FWHT. We apply the FFT parallel-pipeline approach on a Fast WHT and use the High-Level Synthesis (HLS) tool from Xilinx Vitis to generate an FPGA solution. We also provide an open-source code with the basic blocks to build any model with any parallelization level. The parallel-pipeline proposed solutions achieve a latency reduction of up to 3.57% compared to a pipeline approach on a 256-long signal using 32 bit floating-point numbers.