Design of a Unified Transport Triggered Processor for LDPC/Turbo Decoder

Abstract: This paper summarizes the design of a programmable processor with transport triggered architecture (TTA) for decoding LDPC and turbo codes. The processor architecture is designed in such a manner that it can be programmed for LDPC or turbo decoding for the purpose of internetworking and roaming between different networks. The standard trellis based maximum a posteriori (MAP) algorithm is used for turbo decoding. Unlike most other implementations, a supercode based sum-product algorithm is used for the check node message computation for LDPC decoding. This approach ensures the highest hardware utilization of the processor architecture for the two different algorithms. Up to our knowledge, this is the first attempt to design a TTA processor for the LDPC decoder. The processor is programmed with a high level language to meet the time-to-market requirement. The optimization techniques and the usage of the function units for both algorithms are explained in detail. The processor achieves 22.64 Mbps throughput for turbo decoding with a single iteration and 10.12 Mbps throughput for LDPC decoding with five iterations for a clock frequency of 200 MHz.