Very Low Power Viterbi Decoder Employing Minimum Transition and Exchangeless Algorithms for Multimedia Mobile Communication

A very low power consumption viterbi decoder has been developed by low supply voltage and 0.15 µm CMOS process technology. Significant power reduction can be achieved by modifying the design and implementation of viterbi decoder using conventional techniques traceback and Register Exchange to Hybrid Register Exchange Method (HREM), Minimum Transition Register Exchange Method (MTREM), Minimum Transition Hybrid Register Exchange Method (MTHREM), Register exchangeless Method and Hybrid Register exchangeless Method. By employing the above said schemes such as, HREM, MTREM, MTHREM, Register exchangeless Method and Hybrid Register exchangeless Method; the viterbi decoder achieves a drastic reduction in power consumption below 100 µW at a supply voltage of 1.62 V when the data rate of 5 Mb/s and the bit error rate is less than 10-3. This excellent performance has been paved the way to employing the strong forward error correction and low power consumption portable terminals for personnel communication, mobile multimedia communication and digital audio broadcasting. Implementation insight and general conclusions can particularly benefit from this approach are given.