Hardware Efficient and Low Latency Implementations of Look-Ahead ACS Computation for Viterbi Decoders

Abstract

The throughput rate of Viterbi decoding (VD) is not limited by the speed of functional units when look-ahead computation techniques are used. The disadvantages of the look-ahead computation in VD are the hardware complexity and the decode latency. In this paper, implementation methods of the look-ahead ACS computation are proposed to improve the hardware efficiency and reduce the latency where the hardware efficiency and the latency can be balanced with a single parameter.