Combined turbo and convolutional decoder architecture for UMTS wireless applications

Advanced channel coding techniques are a necessity for sophisticated communication systems. The 3GPP standard specifies channel coding techniques like convolutional and turbo-codes. Efficient VLSI implementations of 3GPP compliant channel decoders are therefore mandatory. In this paper we present a combined turbo and convolutional decoder architecture which targets UMTS terminal applications. It outperforms a solution based on two separate decoders due to efficient reuse of computational hardware and memory resources for both decoders.