Low-effort high-performance viterbi-based receiver for Bluetooth LE applications

This paper presents a novel demodulator architecture which significantly improves the receiver performance for continuous phase modulation (CPM) signals with low-effort and low-complexity design. A Viterbi algorithm (VA) based soft decision is implemented with multiple bits differential discriminator to fully utilize the dynamical range. The whole digital circuit is verified and synthesized in ASICs, and its BER performance against channel noise is measured through FPGA with the Bluetooth receiver chip. Compared to hard-decision and decision feedback equalizer (DFE) methods, measurement results show that the proposed demodulator gains a large advantage in Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) communications where power efficiency and implementation complexity are of primary concern.