VLSI Architecture for Matrix Inversion using Modified Gram-Schmidt based QR Decomposition

Matrix inversion and triangularization problems are common to a wide variety of communication systems, signal processing applications and solution of a set of linear equations. Matrix inversion is a computationally intensive process and its hardware implementation based on fixed-point (FP) arithmetic is a challenging problem. This paper proposes a fully parallel VLSI architecture under fixed-precision for the inverse computation of a real square matrix using QR decomposition with modified Gram-Schmidt (MGS) orthogonalization. The MGS algorithm is stable and accurate to the integral multiples of machine precision under fixed-precision for a well-conditioned non-singular matrix. For typical matrices (4 times 4) found in MIMO communication systems, the proposed architecture was able to achieve a clock rate of 277 MHz with a latency of 18 time units and area of 72K gates using 0.18-mum CMOS technology. For a generic square matrix of order n, the latency required is 5n - 2 which is better than all previously known architectures. With the use of LUTs and log-domain computations, the total area has been reduced compared to architectures based on linear-domain computations