High-Speed Viterbi Decoder

Abstract

The Viterbi algorithm is the most well-known trellis-based maximum likelihood decoding algorithm. Trellis decoding is used to recover encoded information that was corrupted during transmission over a noisy channel. The Viterbi algorithm is implemented with a Viterbi decoder. High-speed applications require high-speed Viterbi decoders. Therefore, many hardware solutions have been proposed to improve the performance of Viterbi decoders. These hardware solutions explore the properties of the Viterbi algorithm to simplify and improve the architecture of the decoder. In particular, statistical properties of the algorithm are used to design parallel Viterbi decoders with very high data decoding rates. The article focuses on the implementation of high-speed Viterbi decoders.