A 140-Mb/s, 32-state, radix-4 Viterbi decoder

A 140-Mb/s, 32-state, radix-4, R=1/2, eight-level soft-decision Viterbi decoder has been designed and fabricated using 1.2-μm double-metal CMOS. The architecture of the add-compare-select (ACS) array is based on a restructuring of the conventional radix-2 trellis into a radix-4 trellis. Radix-4 units, consisting of four 4-way ACS units, process two stages of the constituent radix-2 trellis per iteration. A four-way ACS circuit achieves an iteration delay 17% longer than comparable two-way ACS circuits, resulting in a factor of 1.7 increase in throughput. A ring-based ACS placement and state metric routing topology achieves an area efficiency comparable to radix-2 designs. In a process referred to as pretrace-back, one stage of lookahead is applied to the trace-back recursion, combining two radix-4 trace-back iterations into a single radix-16 iteration based on 4-b decisions. This allows implementation of trace-back using one compact, single-ported decision memory, organized as a cyclic buffer. A 7.30-mm×8.49-mm chip containing 146000 transistors achieves a radix-4 iteration rate of 70 MHz