Fixed-Point Fast Decoding of the Silver Code

The Silver code is a full rate and full diversity code constructed from two Alamouti blocks for 2times2 multiple input and multiple output systems. It is particularly attractive for practical implementation as it has been shown that the Silver code can be optimally decoded with quadratic decoding complexity. This paper, for the first time, studies the fixed-point implementation of the quadratic decoding with the aims of low hardware cost (area, power) and fast decoding response while retaining decoding performance.