A Novel VLSI Architecture of Fixed-complexity Sphere Decoder

Fixed-complexity sphere decoder (FSD) is a recently proposed technique for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) detection. It has several outstanding features such as constant throughput and large potential parallelism, which makes it suitable for efficient VLSI implementation. However, to our best knowledge, no VLSI implementation of FSD has been reported in the literature, although some FPGA prototypes of FSD with pipeline architecture have been developed. These solutions achieve very high throughput but at very high cost of hardware resources, making them impractical in real applications. In this paper, we present a novel four-nodes-per-cycle parallel architecture of FSD, with a breadth-first processing that allows for short critical path. The implementation achieves a throughput of 213.3 Mbps at 400 MHz clock frequency, at a cost of 0.18 mm(2) Silicon area on 0.13 mu m CMOS technology. The proposed solution is much more economical compared with the existing FPGA implementations, and very suitable for practical applications because of its balanced performance and hardware complexity; moreover it has the flexibility to be expanded into an eight-nodes-per-cycle version in order to double the throughput.