In wireless communications, the use of multiple antennas at both the transmitter and the receiver is a key technology to enable high data rate transmission without additional bandwidth or transmit power. Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) schemes are widely used in many wireless standards, allowing higher throughput using spatial multiplexing techniques. MIMO soft detection poses significant challenges to the MIMO receiver design as the detection complexity increases exponentially with the number of antennas. As the next generation wireless system is pushing for multi-Gbps data rate, there is a great need for high-throughput low-complexity soft-output MIMO detector.

The brute-force implementation of the optimal MIMO detection algorithm would consume enormous power and is not feasible for the current technology. We propose a reduced-complexity soft-output MIMO detector architecture based on a trellis-search method. We convert the MIMO detection problem into a shortest path problem. We introduce a path reduction and a path extension algorithm to reduce the search complexity while still maintaining sufficient soft information values for the detection. We avoid the missing counter-hypothesis problem by keeping multiple paths during the trellis search process. The proposed trellis-search algorithm is a data-parallel algorithm and is very suitable for high speed VLSI implementation. Compared with the conventional tree-search based detectors, the proposed trellis-based detector has a significant improvement in terms of detection throughput and area efficiency. The proposed MIMO detector has great potential to be applied for the next generation Gbps wireless systems by achieving very high throughput and good error performance.

The soft information generated by the MIMO detector will be processed by a channel decoder, e.g. a low-density parity-check (LDPC) decoder or a Turbo decoder, to recover the original information bits. Channel decoder is another very computational-intensive block in a MIMO receiver SoC (system-on-chip). We will present high-performance LDPC decoder architectures and Turbo decoder architectures to achieve 1+ Gbps data rate. Further, a configurable decoder architecture that can be dynamically reconfigured to support both LDPC codes and Turbo codes is developed to support multiple 3G/4G wireless standards.

We will present ASIC and FPGA implementation results of various MIMO detectors, LDPC decoders, and Turbo decoders. We will discuss in details the computational complexity and the throughput performance of these detectors and decoders.