Performance comparison of high level modulation techniques for land mobile communications

The problem of error control with decoding based on the Viterbi algorithm is addressed. Particular codes correspond to patterns of local wiring and this leads to the possibility of realising programmable reconfigurable or adaptive Viterbi decoders according to the crosspoint switch technology employed. For sequential implementations these establish the possibility of simplifying the access circuitry for state metric and path history memories. As shown, by the author, this is achieved by a small number of add-compare-select processors. An analysis is presented of the steps required to evolve a VLSI design for certain 16 state codes.<>