A study on the Cost-effective Architecture Design of High-speed Soft-decision Viterbi Decoder for Multi-band OFDM Systems

In this paper, we present a cost-effective architecture of high-speed soft-decision Viterbi decoder for Multi-band OFDM(MB-OFDM) systems. In the design of modem for MB-OFDM systems, a parallel processing architecture is general]y used for the reliable hardware implementation, because the systems should support a very high-speed data rate of at most 480Mbps. A Viterbi decoder also should be designed by using a parallel processing structure and support a very high-speed data rate. Therefore, we present a optimized hardware architecture for 4-way parallel processing Viterbi decoder in this paper. In order to optimize the hardware of Viterbi decoder, we compare and analyze various ACS architectures and find the optimal one among them with respect to hardware complexity and operating frequency The Viterbi decoder with a optimal hardware architecture is designed and verified by using Verilog HDL, and synthesized into gate-level circuits with TSMC 0.13um library. In the synthesis results, we find that the Viterbi decoder contains about 280K gates and works properly at the speed required in MB-OFDM systems.