A very low cost hardware interleaver for 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) turbo coding algorithm is presented. The interleaver is a key component of turbo codes and it is used to minimize the effect of burst errors in the transmission. Using conventional design methods, it consumes a large part of silicon area in the design of turbo encoder and decoder. The presented hardware interleaver architecture utilizes the algorithmic level hardware simplifications as well as the iterative modulo computation to achieve very low cost solution.After doing the hardware multiplexing and optimization the proposed architecture consumes only 1.5 k gates (without pre-computation) and 2.2 k gates (with precomputation). In both cases the interleaved address is computed every clock cycle except the case of pruning, in which one additional clock cycle is consumed.

This paper presents a unified, radix-4 implementation of turbo decoder, covering multiple standards such as DVB, WiMAX, 3GPP-LTE and HSPA Evolution. The radix-4, parallel interleaver is the bottleneck while using the same turbo-decoding architecture for multiple standards. This paper covers the issues associated with design of radix-4 parallel interleaver to reach to flexible turbodecoder architecture. Radix-4, parallel interleaver algorithms and their mapping on to hardware architecture is presented for multi-mode operations. The overheads associated with hardware multiplexing are found to be least significant. Other than flexibility for the turbo decoder implementation, the low silicon cost and low power aspects are also addressed by optimizing the storage scheme for branch metrics and extrinsic information. The proposed unified architecture for radix-4 turbo decoding consumes 0.65 mm 2 area in total in 65 nm CMOS process. With 4 SISO blocks used in parallel and 6 iterations, it can achieve a throughput up to 173.3 Mbps while consuming 570 mW power in total. It provides a good trade-off between silicon cost, power consumption and throughput with silicon efficiency of 0.005 mm 2 /Mbps and energy efficiency of 0.55 nJ/b/iter.

Abstract − This paper presents a novel hardware interleaver architecture for unified parallel turbo decoding. The architecture is fully re-configurable among multiple standards like HSPA Evolution, DVB-SH, 3GPP-LTE and WiMAX. Turbo codes being widely used for error correction in today's consumer electronics are prone to introduce higher latency due to bigger block sizes and multiple iterations. Many parallel turbo decoding architectures have recently been proposed to enhance the channel throughput but the interleaving algorithms used in different standards do not freely allow using them due to higher percentage of memory conflicts. The architecture presented in this paper provides a re-configurable platform for implementing the parallel interleavers for different standards by managing the conflicts involved in each. The memory conflicts are managed by applying different approaches like stream misalignment, memory division and use of small FIFO buffer. The proposed flexible architecture is low cost and consumes 0.085 mm 2 area in 65nm CMOS process. It can implement up to 8 parallel interleavers and can operate at a frequency of 200 MHz, thus providing significant support to higher throughput systems based on parallel SISO processors.

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This paper presents a flexible interleaver architecture supporting multiple standards like WLAN, WiMAX, HSPA+, 3GPP-LTE, and DVB. Algorithmic level optimizations like 2D transformation and realization of recursive computation are applied, which appear to be the key to reach to an efficient hardware multiplexing among different interleaver implementations. The presented hardware enables the mapping of vital types of interleavers including multiple block interleavers and convolutional interleaver onto a single architecture. By exploiting the hardware reuse methodology the silicon cost is reduced, and it consumes 0.126 mm 2 area in total in 65 nm CMOS process for a fully reconfigurable architecture. It can operate at a frequency of 166 MHz, providing a maximum throughput up to 664 Mbps for a multistream system and 166 Mbps for single stream communication systems, respectively. One of the vital requirements for multimode operation is the fast switching between different standards, which is supported by this hardware with minimal cycle cost overheads. Maximum flexibility and fast switchability among multiple standards during run time makes the proposed architecture a right choice for the radio baseband processing platform.