Area and power efficient trellis computational blocks in 0.13μm CMOS

Improved add-compare-select and branch metric units are presented to reduce the complexity in the implementation of trellis-based decoding architectures. These units use a complementary property of the best rate 1/2 convolutional codes to reduce both area requirements and power consumption in a silicon implementation with no loss in decoding performance. For a 0.13μm CMOS process, synthesized computational blocks for decoders that can process codes from memory 2 up to 7 show up to 17% savings in both cell area and power consumption.