A fully synthesizable parameterized Viterbi decoder

The Viterbi algorithm is widely used in digital communications. It realizes the maximum-likelihood decoding of convolutional codes received from a noisy channel. Depending on the application (terrestrial, digital modems, digital cellular telephone applications and others) a Viterbi decoder must be designed to respect specific requirements such as small area, high speed or maximum efficiency. This paper presents a parameterized implementation of this algorithm for design reuse purposes, in order to allow the implementation of the most optimized solution for each application, exploiting input parallelism, sharing the ACS units, adjusting depth of computation and BER computation.