Relaxed $K$ -Best MIMO Signal Detector Design and VLSI Implementation

Signal detector is a key element in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication receiver. It has been well demonstrated that nonlinear tree search MIMO detectors can achieve near-optimum detection performance, nevertheless their efficient high-speed VLSI implementations are not trivial. For example, the hardware design of hard- or soft- output detectors for a 4 times 4 MIMO system with 64 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) still remains missing in the open literature. As an attempt to tackle this challenge, this paper presents an implementation-oriented breadth-first tree search MIMO detector design solution. The key is to appropriately modify the conventional breadth-first tree search detection algorithm in order to largely improve the suitability for efficient hardware implementation, while maintaining good detection performance. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design solution, using 0.13-mum CMOS standard cell and memory libraries, we designed a soft-output signal detector for 4 times 4 MIMO with 64-QAM. With the silicon area of about 31 mm², the detector can achieve above 100 Mb/s and realize the performance very close to that of the sphere decoding algorithm