A hardware efficiency analysis for simplified trellis decoding blocks

Two simplifications for trellis decoding blocks are analyzed in terms of hardware efficiency. Both architectures use a complementary property of the best rate 1/n convolutional codes to reduce arithmetic complexity. While the reduction can be calculated straightforward in the first approach (17%), the other approach relies on modified computational operations and hence this reduction is not as evident. It is shown that for rate 1/2 codes the first approach is preferable for hardware implementation in terms of area and speed.