This paper presents a hardware-efficient auto-correlation scheme for the synchronization of MIMO-OFDM based wireless local area network (WLAN) systems, such as IEEE 802.11n. Carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation for the frequency synchronization requires high complexity auto-correlation operations of many training symbols. In order to reduce the hardware complexity of the MIMO-OFDM synchronization, we propose an efficient correlation scheme based on time-multiplexing technique and the use of reduced samples while preserving the performance. Compared to a conventional architecture, the proposed architecture requires only 27% logic gates and 22% power consumption with acceptable BER performance loss.