Implementation of an equaliser for the GSM system

The GSM system for pan-European cellular radio is the first to require channel equalisation in a consumer product. The output data, together with confidence information, is fed to another VLSI device which carries out the FEC decoding. Other outputs, and control inputs, are in the main supplied by a microprocessor over a proprietary bus. The authors discuss only those parts of the device concerned directly with the Viterbi equalisation; the carrier burst detection and frequency measurement blocks were designed using an analogous methodology