Memoryless Viterbi decoder

Abstract

The problem of survival memory management of a Viterbi decoder (VD) was solved by introducing a novel pointer implementation for the register exchange method, where a pointer is assigned to each row of memory in the survivor memory unit (SMU). The content of the pointer which points to one row of memory is altered to point to another row of memory, instead of copying the contents of the first row to the second. In this paper, the one-pointer VD is proposed; if the initial state of the convolutional encoder is known, the entire SMU is reduced to only one row. Because the decoded data bits are generated in the required order, even this row of memory is dispensable. Thus, the one-pointer architecture, referred to as memoryless VD (MLVD), reduces the power consumption of a traditional traceback VD by approximately 50%, but has some performance degradation. A prototype of the MLVD with a one third convolutional code rate and a constraint length of nine is mapped into a Xilinx 2V6000 chip, operating at 25 MHz with a decoding throughput of more than 3 Mbps and a latency of two data bits.