A list sphere detector (LSD) is an enhancement of a sphere detector (SD) that can be used to approximate the optimal MAP detector. In this paper, we introduce a novel architecture for the increasing radius (IR)-LSD algorithm, which is based on the Dijkstra’s algorithm. The parallelism possibilities are introduced in the presented architecture, which is also scalable for different multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The novel architecture is implemented on a Virtex-IV field programmable gate array (FPGA) chip using high-level ANSI C++ language based Catapult C Synthesis tool from Mentor Graphics. The used word lengths, the latency of the design, and the required resources are presented and analyzed for 4 x 4 MIMO system with 16- quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). The detector implementation achieves a maximum throughput of 12.1Mbps at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).