Efficient design of symbol detector for MIMO-OFDM based wireless LANs

In this paper, efficient hardware architecture for MIMO-OFDM symbol detector with two transmit and two receive antennas is proposed. The proposed symbol detector supports two MIMO-OFDM modes of SFBC-OFDM and SDM-OFDM. It can be implemented with shared-architecture, since the detection algorithms of two MIMO-OFDM modes are similar. Therefore, by eliminating duplicated function blocks, reduced-complexity implementation can be possible. It was designed in a hardware description language and synthesized to gate-level circuits using 0.18 μm CMOS standard cell library. The total logic gate count for the symbol detector is 164K. By the efficient hardware architecture, the proposed symbol detector results in the reduction of the logic gates by 34% and the power consumption by 38%.