High-Throughput Trellis Processor for Multistandard FEC Decoding

Trellis codes, including Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC), turbo, and convolutional code (CC), are widely adopted in advanced wireless standards to offer high-throughput forward error correction (FEC). Designing a multistandard FEC decoder is of great challenge. In this paper, a trellis application specified instruction-set processor (TASIP) is presented for multistandard trellis decoding. A unified forward-backward recursion kernel with an eight-state parallel trellis structure is proposed. Based on the kernel, a datapath for multialgorithm and a shared memory subsystem are introduced. The flexibility and the compatibility are guaranteed by a programmable decoding flow and the trellis decoding instruction set. Synthesis results show that the area consumption is 2.12 mm² (65 nm). TASIP provides trimode FEC decoding ability with the throughput of 533, 186, and 225 Mb/s for LDPC, turbo, and 64 states CC under the clock frequency of 200 MHz, which outperforms other trimode proposals both in area efficiency and recursion efficiency. TASIP provides high-throughput decoding for current standards, including 3rd Generation Partnership Project-Long Term Evolution, 802.16e, and 802.11n, with unified architecture and high compatibility.