A Design of Parameterized Viterbi Decoder for Multi-standard Applications

This paper describes an efficient design of a multi-standard Viterbi decoder that supports multiple constraint lengths and code rates. The Viterbi decoder is parameterized for the code rates 1/2, 1/3 and constraint lengths 7,9, thus it has four operation nodes. In order to achieve low hardware complexity and low power, an efficient architecture based on hardware sharing techniques is devised. Also, the optimization of ACCS (Accumulate-Subtract) circuit for the one-point trace-back algorithm reduces its area by about 35% compared to the full parallel ACCS circuit. The parameterized Viterbi decoder core has 79,818 gates and 25,600 bits memory, and the estimated throughput is about 105 Mbps at 70 MHz clock frequency. Also, the simulation results for BER (Bit Error Rate) performance show that the Viterbi decoder has BER of at of 3.6 dB when it operates with code rate 1/3 and constraints 7.