Low Power Symbol Detector for MIMO Communication Systems

In this paper, an low power symbol detector is proposed for MIMO communication system with two transmit and two receive antennas. The proposed symbol detector can support both the spatial multiplexing (SM) mode and spatial diversity (SD) mode for MIMO transmission technique, and shows the optimal maximum likelihood (ML) performance. Also, by sharing the hardware block and using the dedicated clock MIMO modes, the power of the proposed architecture is dramatically decreased. The proposed symbol detector was designed in hardware description language (HDL) and synthesized to logic gates using a CMOS standard cell library. The power consumption was estimated by using Synopsys Power CompilerTM, which is reduced by maximum 85%, compared with the conventional architecture.