Viturbo: a reconfigurable architecture for Viterbi and turbo decoding

A runtime reconfigurable architecture for high speed Viterbi and Turbo decoding is designed and implemented on an FPGA. The architecture can be reconfigured to decode a range of convolutionally coded data with constraint lengths varying from 3 to 9, rates 1/2 and 1/3, and various generator polynomials. It can also be reconfigured to decode Turbo coded data with constraint length 4 and rate 1/3. Reconfiguration of the architecture requires a single clock cycle and does not require FPGA reprogramming. The proposed architecture can deliver data rates up to 60.5 Mbps for Viterbi decoding and 3.54 Mbps for Turbo decoding, making it suitable for a range of wireless communication standards like IEEE 802.11a, 3GPP, GSM, GPRS, and many others.