High-speed Viterbi decoder: an efficient scheduling method to exploit the pipelining

The main part of the Viterbi algorithm is a nonlinear feedback loop which presents a bottleneck for high-speed implementations. We present a novel scheduling scheme that allows increasing the available speed of the system. This is done through the utilization of look-ahead techniques to compute non-sequential data and, in this way, break the recursivity of the algorithm. This permits introducing pipelining. As a result, we obtain a speed growth comparable to previous parallel solutions, but with less hardware cost