A Design of Efficient Viterbi Decoder with High Speed Low Power Consumption for TCM Decoders

Abstract: High-speed, low-power design of Viterbi decoders for trellis coded modulation (TCM) systems is presented in this paper. It is well known that the Viterbi decoder (VD) is the dominant module determining the overall power consumption of TCM decoders. We propose a pre-computation architecture incorporated with T-algorithm for VD, which can effectively reduce the power consumption without degrading the decoding speed much. A general solution to derive the optimal pre-computation steps is also given in the paper. Implementation result of a VD for a rate-3/4 convolutional code used in a TCM system shows that compared with the full trellis VD, the pre computation architecture reduces the power consumption by as much as 70% without performance loss, while the degradation in clock speed is negligible.

Keywords: Trellis coded modulation (TCM), viterbi decoder, VLSI.