A low-complexity composite QR decomposition architecture for MIMO detector

This paper presents a low complexity QR decomposition (QRD) architecture for MIMO detector. In the proposed approach, various CORDIC-based QRD algorithms are efficiently combined together to reduce the computational complexity of the QRD hardware. Based on the computational complexity analysis on various QRD algorithms, a low complexity approach is selected at each stage of QRD process. The proposed QRD architecture can be applied to any arbitrary dimension of channel matrix, and the complexity reduction grows with the increasing matrix dimension. Our QR decomposition hardware was implemented using Samsung 0.13 μm technology. The numerical results show that the proposed architecture achieves 47% increase in the QAR (QRD Rate/Gate count) with 28.1% power savings over the conventional Householder CORDIC-based architecture for the 4x4 matrix decomposition.