High speed low power Soft-Output Viterbi decoder

Abstract

A high speed low power Soft-Output Viterbi decoder designed for the convolutional codes used in the ECMA-368 UWB standard is presented in this thesis. A novel hybrid SMU architecture using the trace-forward method is proposed. It can reduce the overall required memory and achieve high throughput without consuming much power. This thesis also proposes a way to concatenate the SOVA decoder and Reed-Solomon (RS) decoder, which can achieve about 0.35 dB decoding performance gain compared to the conventional Viterbi-RS decoder.