Viterbi Accelerator for Embedded Processor Datapaths

We present a novel architecture for a lightweight Viterbi accelerator that can be tightly integrated inside an embedded processor datapath. We investigate the accelerator´s impact on processor performance by using the EEMBC Viterbi benchmark and the in-house Viterbi Branch Metric kernel. Our evaluation based on the EEMBC benchmark shows that an accelerated 65-nm 2.7-ns processor datapath is 20% larger but 90% more cycle efficient than a datapath lacking the Viterbi accelerator, leading to an 87% overall energy reduction and a data throughput of 3.52 Mbit/s.