VLSI Design of Soft Decision Viterbi Decoder Using Systolic Array Architecture

역추적 방식의 시스토릭 어레이 구조를 가진 연판정 비터비 복호기의 설계

Convolutional coding with Viterbi decoding is known as a powerful method for forward error correction among many kinds of channel coding methods. This paper presents a soft decision Viterbi decoder which has systolic array trace-back architecture[1]. Soft decision is known as more effective method than hard decision and most of digital communication systems use soft decision. The advantage of using a systolic array decoder is that the trace-back operation can be accomplished continuously in an array of registers in a pipe-line fashion, instead of waiting for the entire trace-back procedure to be completed at each iteration. Therefore it may be suitable for faster communication system. We described operations of each module of the decoder and showed results of the logic synthesis and functional simulation.