Design and Implementation of Turbo Decoders for Software Defined Radio

Software defined radio (SDR) is an emerging paradigm for wireless terminals, in which the physical layer of communication protocols is implemented in software rather than by ASICs. Many of the current and next generation wireless protocols include turbo coding because of its superior performance. However, turbo decoding is computationally intensive, and its low power implementations have typically been in ASICs. This paper presents a case study of algorithm-architecture co-design of turbo decoder for SDR. We present a programmable DSP architecture for SDR that includes a set of architectural features to accelerate turbo decoder computations. We then present a parallel window scheduling for MAX-Log-MAP component decoder that matches well with the DSP architecture. Finally, we present a software implementation of turbo decoder for W-CDMA on the DSP architecture and show that it achieves 2 Mbps decoding throughput