A new architecture for the Viterbi decoder for code rate k/n

A novel VLSI architecture is proposed for implementing a long constraint length Viterbi decoder (VD) for code rate k/n. This architecture is based on the encoding structure where k input bits are shifted into k shift registers in each cycle. The architecture is designed in a hierarchical manner by breaking the system into several levels and designing each level independently. The tasks in the design of each level range from determining the number of computation units, and the interconnection between the units, to the allocation and scheduling of operations. Additional design issues such as in-place storage of accumulated path metrics and trace back implementation of the survivor memory have also been addressed. The resulting architecture is regular, has a foldable global topology and is very flexible. It also achieves a better than linear trade-off between hardware complexity and computation time.