FPGA Design and Implementation of a Low-Power Systolic Array-Based Adaptive Viterbi Decoder

摘要

In this paper, by modifying the well-known Viterbi algorithm, an adaptive Viterbi algorithm that is based on strongly connected trellis decoding is proposed. Using this algorithm, the design and a field-programmable gate array implementation of a low-power adaptive Viterbi decoder with a constraint length of 9 and a code rate of 1/2 is presented. In this design, a novel systolic array-based architecture with time multiplexing and arithmetic pipelining for implementing the proposed algorithm is used. It is shown that the proposed algorithm can reduce by up to 70% the average number of ACS computations over that by using the non-adaptive Viterbi algorithm, without degradation in the error performance. This results in lowering the switching activities of the logic cells, with a consequent reduction in the dynamic power. Further, it is shown that the total power consumption in the implementation of the proposed algorithm can be reduced by up to 43% compared to that in the implementation of the nonadaptive Viterbi algorithm, with a negligible increase in the hardware.