A domain specific reconfigurable Viterbi fabric for system-on-chip applications

A novel embedded dynamically reconfigurable fabric for implementing the Viterbi algorithm in a system-on-chip device is presented in this paper. The proposed reconfigurable fabric can support Viterbi implementations for different standards, such as GSM, IS-95, CDMA and Wireless LAN. Our results illustrate that the proposed architecture has superior power consumption and throughput characteristics and it is demonstrated a 80% reduction in power consumption over generic field programmable gate array (FPGA) and 40 times improvement in throughput over digital signal processor (DSP), respectively. Thus, the reconfigurable system-on-chip platform based on this kind of domain specific reconfigurable fabrics is an efficient solution for the high-performance portable communication systems.