A 4.32 mm2 170mW LDPC decoder in 0.13μm CMOS for WiMax/Wi-Fi applications

An energy-efficient programmable LDPC decoder is proposed for WiMax and Wi-Fi applications. The proposed decoder is designed with overlapped processing units, flexible message passing network and medium-grain partitioned memories to achieve flexibility, area reduction, and energy efficiency. The decoder can be programmed by host processor with several special-purpose micro-instructions. Thus, various operation modes can be reconfigured. Fabricated in SMIC 0.13μm 1P8M CMOS process, the chip occupies 4.32 mm² with core area 2.97 mm², and consumes 170mW with a throughput of 302Mb/s when operating at 145MHz and 1.2V.