Design and Architecture of Low-Latency High-Speed Turbo Decoders

Abstract

In this paper, we propose and present implementation results of a high-speed turbo decoding algorithm. The latency caused by (de)interleaving and iterative decoding in a conventional maximum a posteriori turbo decoder can be dramatically reduced with the proposed design. The source of the latency reduction is from the combination of the radix-4, center to top, parallel decoding, and early-stop algorithms. This reduced latency enables the use of the turbo decoder as a forward error correction scheme in real-time wireless communication services. The proposed scheme results in a slight degradation in bit error rate performance for large block sizes because the effective interleaver size in a radix-4 implementation is reduced to half, relative to the conventional method. To prove the latency reduction, we implemented the proposed scheme on a field-programmable gate array and compared its decoding speed with that of a conventional decoder. The results show an improvement of at least five fold for a single iteration of turbo decoding. Keywords: Turbo code, radix-4, center-to-top, parallel decoding, early-stop, FPGA.