High speed low complexity radix-16 Max-Log-MAP SISO decoder

At present, the main challenge for hardware implementation turbo decoders is to achieve the high data rates required by current and future communication system standards. In order to address this challenge, a low complexity radix-16 SISO decoder for the Max-Log- MAP algorithm is proposed in this paper. Based on the elimination of parallel paths in the radix-16 trellis diagram, architectural solutions to reduce the hardware complexity of the different blocks of a SISO decoder are detailed. Moreover, two complementary techniques are introduced order to overcome BER/FER performance degradation when turbo decoders based on the proposed SISO decoder are considered. Thus, a penalty lower than 0.05dB is observed for a 8 state binary turbo code with respect to a traditional radix-2 turbo decoder for 6 decoding iterations.