A 335Mb/s 3.9mm2 65nm CMOS flexible MIMO detection-decoding engine achieving 4G wireless data rates

In today’s and in future further evolved wireless standards, such as WiMAX, 3GPP-LTE or LTE-Advanced, receiver terminals have to support numerous operating modes for each protocol [1] as well as sophisticated transmission techniques, especially enhanced MIMO detection and iterative forward error correction (FEC). These two belong to the most computationally complex parts of the receiver-side baseband signal processing chain. Implementations thereof must have low power consumption but also be able to interact in a flexible and efficient way forming a detection-decoding engine, not compromising on the challenging throughput and flexibility requirements associated with 4G standards. In this paper we present a chip implementation of a MIMO Sphere detector combined with a flexible FEC engine, forming the first detectiondecoding engine in silicon capable of satisfying 4G requirements with a data rate of 335Mb/s.