Dual-Select FMA Butterfly for FFT: Eliminating Twiddle Factor Singularities with Bounded Precomputed Ratios
Abstract
The fused multiply-add (FMA) instruction enables the radix-2 FFT butterfly to be computed in 6~FMA operations -- the proven minimum. The classical factorization by Linzer and Feig~\cite{linzer1993} precomputes the ratio , which is singular when the twiddle factor is (i.e., ). Standard practice clamps to a small epsilon, degrading numerical precision. We observe that an alternative factorization using as the outer multiplier (precomputing ) avoids this particular singularity but introduces a new one at . We then propose a \emph{dual-select} strategy that chooses, per twiddle factor, whichever factorization yields . This eliminates all singularities, requires no epsilon clamping, and bounds the precomputed ratio to unity for all twiddle factors. For , the worst-case ratio drops from 163 (Linzer-Feig) to exactly~1.0 (dual-select), yielding a tighter error bound in FP16 arithmetic over 10~FFT passes. The strategy adds zero computational overhead -- only the precomputed twiddle table changes.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.00567,
title = {Dual-Select FMA Butterfly for FFT: Eliminating Twiddle Factor Singularities with Bounded Precomputed Ratios},
author = {Mohamed Amine Bergach},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.00567},
year = {2026}
}