We present a novel pipelined fast Fourier transform (FFT) architecture which is capable of producing the output sequence in normal order. A single-path delay commutator processing element (SDC PE) has been proposed for the first time. It saves a complex adder compared with the typical radix-2 butterfly unit. The new pipelined architecture can be built using the proposed processing element. The proposed architecture can lead to 100% hardware utilization and 50% reduction in the overall number of adders required in the conventional pipelined FFT designs. In order to produce the output sequence in normal order

we also present a bit reverser

which can achieve a 50% reduction in memory usage.