High Performance Viterbi Decoder on Cell/BE

Viterbi decoding is widely used in many radio systems. Because of the large computation complexity, it is usually implemented with ASIC chips, FPGA chips, or optimized hardware accelerators. With the rapid development of the multicore technology, multicore platforms become a reasonable choice for software radio (SR) systems. The Cell Broadband Engine processor is a state-of-art multi-core processor designed by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM. In this paper, we present a 64-state soft input Viterbi decoder for WIMAX SR Baseband system based on the Cell processor. With one Synergistic Processor Element (SPE) of a Cell Processor running at 3.2GHz, our Viterbi decoder can achieve the throughput up to 30Mb/s to decode the tall-biting convolutional code. The performance demonstrates that the proposed Viterbi decoding implementation is very efficient. Moreover, the Viterbi decoder can be easily integrated to the SR system and can provide a highly integrated SR solution. The optimization methodology in this module design can be extended to other modules on Cell platform.