A Low-Complexity Maximum Likelihood Detector for the Spatially Modulated Signals: Algorithm and Hardware Implementation

Aiming to increase the transmission data rate, the spatial modulation (SM) scheme maps each block of information bits to a digitally modulated symbol and additionally a transmit antenna index in a multiple transmit antenna system. In this brief, we focus on the maximum likelihood detection (MLD) scheme that detects SM signals with low computational complexity. By reformulating the MLD problem, we obtain a new mathematical expression as the MLD solution. To avoid the numerically unstable division operation, we apply the Givens rotation to realize this new expression and obtain a low-complexity MLD algorithm. We also propose a coordinate rotation digital computer-based hardware architecture to detect SM signals with 64-quaternary amplitude modulated (QAM) symbols over the correlated channel with eight transmit antennas and four receive antennas. The VLSI implementation results under the TSMC 90-nm CMOS technology reveal that our division-free architecture requires 70.5K gates and provides detection throughput 432.68 Mb/s, while operating at frequency 384.6 MHz. Our design is the first hardware architecture to achieve the exact MLD performance and is easily modified to detect SM signals with arbitrary M-ary QAM symbols and arbitrary numbers of transmit and receive antennas.