Singular Value Decomposition Hardware for MIMO: State of the Art and Custom Design

This paper presents a custom hardware design for computing Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) of the radio communication channel characteristic matrix. The custom hard-ware was implemented to reduce the SVD computing time. The pipeline hardware developed is suitable for computing the SVD of a sequence of 2 × 2 complex-value matrices used in MIMO-OFDM standards, such as the IEEE 802.11n. The hardware developed achieves an optimum pipeline rate which equaled the maximum hardware clock rate. The proposed architecture provides performance gains over standard software libraries, such as the ZGESVD function of Linear Algebra Package (LAPACK) library, when running on standard processors.