An architecture for energy efficient sphere decoding

Sphere Decoding has become a popular implementation of MIMO decoding due to its improved performance at lower hardware complexity. Present ASIC implementations fail to consider sources of pipelinability and parallelism in the algorithm to achieve reduced power. In this work, we provide a proposal and initial results for an improved architecture which aims to increase overall energy efficiency (b/s/mW) of the decoder. This improvement is based on a novel implementation which combines the use of a deeply pipelined data-path and "multi symbol vector" based approach to exploit the pipeline. Implementation in 0.18μ 1.8V CMOS technology provides an operational frequency of 128/230(retimed)MHz at 409 mW(DFF memory)/ 360 mW(realistic memory) and 3.44 sq.mm (DFF memory).