Abstract. Carrier synchronization is a vital part of every inner receiver in wireless communications. Frequency offset and phase offset of the received burst must be estimated and the received samples must be corrected according to the estimation. An approximation of the maximum likelihood estimation of frequency offset is given by the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). The accuracy of the estimation as well as the hardware complexity and throughput depend on the number of FFT points. We demonstrate three techniques to improve the accuracy of the FFT based frequency offset estimation respectively to reduce the number of needed FFT points. These three techniques as well as the reference algorithm without improvements combine phase offset estimation with frequency offset estimation. We present the communications and FPGA implementation performance of these techniques.