Mixed-scaling-rotation (MSR) coordinate rotation digital computer (CORDIC) is an attractive approach to synthesizing complex rotators. This paper presents the fixed-point error analysis and parameter selections of MSR-CORDIC with applications to the fast Fourier transform (FFT). First, the fixed-point mean squared error of the MSR-CORDIC is analyzed by considering both the angle approximation error and signal round-off error incurred in the finite precision arithmetic. The signal to quantization noise ratio (SQNR) of the output of the FFT synthesized using MSR-CORDIC is thereafter estimated. Based on these analyses, two different parameter selection algorithms of MSR-CORDIC are proposed for general and dedicated MSR-CORDIC structures. The proposed algorithms minimize the number of adders and word-length when the SQNR of the FFT output is constrained. Design examples show that the FFT designed by the proposed method exhibits a lower hardware complexity than existing methods.