DFT algorithm for FPGA without phase For my FPGA programming lab final project, I want to implement an audio spectrum analyzer. Since I won't be recreating any signals, I only need the frequency magnitude, and not the phase. I'm hoping that ignoring the phase will spare me the trouble of using complex arithmetic, and make the algorithm leaner. I found some references to the discrete hartley transform, which has "no intrinsic involvement of complex numbers" according to wikipedia. I also found the "real DFT" which splits the complex numbers into sine and consine parts. I was wondering, though, how the radix-2 fft butterfly method would be modified for the real DFT or the hartley dft. Or, maybe there's another method to get just the magnitude information that's better for hardware.

Thank you for any advice.
magnitude-only FFT can really only be done with the complex FFT followed by computing the magnitude.

the radix-2 Cooley-Tukey FFT (with the butterflies) will likely be the easiest to implement with a FPGA because of the self-similarity of the butterflies in each FFT pass.  (if you want some simple C code that you might translate into FPGA code, i can supply you with a very simple radix-2 FFT in C.  are you limited to fixed-point or can you do floating point in your implementation?)

if you're displaying spectrum magnitude in dB, then magnitude-squared (without the square root required for magnitude) is easier and just changes the scaling factor on the $\log(\cdot)$ function.

$$\begin{align} 20\log_{10}\left( \Big|X[k] \Big|\right) &amp;= 10\log_{10}\left( \Big|X[k] \Big|^2\right) \\ \\ &amp;= 10\log_{10}\left( \Re\{X[k]\}^2 + \Im\{X[k]\}^2 \right) \end{align} $$

so, for dB, don't bother with the square-root.

if your spectrum analyzer also wants log frequency along the frequency axis, that's another different problem to solve.