FPGA implementation of high-speed parallel maximum a posteriori (MAP) decoders

This paper presents an efficient parallel architecture for high-speed maximum a posteriori (MAP) probability detectors. The parallel systolic scheme proposed here builds upon a sliding window approach, and is capable of providing very high throughput. The implementation of an 8-state MAP decoder on an off-the-shelf field programmable gate array (FPGA) achieves a throughput of 1.6 Gb/s. The MAP detector is well-known as the optimal solution to minimize the bit-error-rate (BER). Moreover, when used for equalization on iterative detectors (i.e., turbo equalizers), the MAP algorithm can achieve a performance near Shannon´s channel capacity. Thus, the scheme described in this work results highly attractive to efficiently mitigate channel impairments found on high-speed optical fiber systems and other high speed communication applications.