An architectural study of a digital signal processor for block codes

This paper examines architectural issues for a domain specific digital signal processor (DS-DSP) which is capable of fast decoding of block codes. In real time systems it was not possible before to employ common processors for this task because of a lack of architectural and arithmetical support. We proposed solutions for the arithmetical problem in previous work. In this paper we focus on architectures for implementation of different block decoding algorithms on a new DS-DSP architecture. The paper also contains benchmarks for our architecture for some selected codes and compares our DS-DSP to common digital signal processors (DSP) and dedicated logic solutions.