**UPDATE:** OverLordGoldDragon gave a solution that is superior to mine on every aspect. He got rid of mirroring, but more importantly he clearly exposed the insight to solve this problem. I hope he gets a shower of points! It turns out to be not that difficult. At least when N is a power of 2. The cornerstone of my approach is mirroring. Vanilla code (python): import numpy as np def mir(xin): n = xin.shape[0] return np.array([xin[-i & (n - 1)] for i in range(n)]) Now I can build an "unscaled" `dft`, using `mir` and `idft` (which is ifft here): import numpy.fft as fft def dft(xin) : return fft.ifft(mir(xin)) I first mirror the frequencies to implement `idft` as radix-2 DIT, allowing in turn to reconstruct only half of the signal. But I need twiddle factors. def split(xin) : t = np.transpose(xin.reshape(-1, 2)) return t[0], t[1] def ifft_half(c): e, o = split(mir(c)) G = dft(e) H = dft(o) N = c.shape[0] W = [np.exp(-1j * 2 * np.pi * k / N) for k in range(N//2)] #twiddle return (G + W * H) / 2