Abstract
A high speed Viterbi decoder with a circularly connected 2-dimensional analog processing ceil array Is proposed. The proposed Viterbi .decoder has a 2-dimensional parallel processing structure in which an analog processing cell is placed at each node of a trellis diagram, the output column of the analog processing cells is connected to the decoding column, and thus, the output(last) column becomes a column right before the decoding(first) column. The reference input signal given at a decoding column is propagated to the whole network while Its magnitude is reduced by the amount of a error metric on each branch. The circuit-based decoding is done by adding a trigger signals of same magnitudes to disconnect the path corresponding to logic 0 (or 1) and by observing its effect at an output column (the former column of the decoding column). The proposed Viterbi decoder has advantages in that it is operated with better performance of error correction, has a shorter latency and requires no path memories. The performance of error correction with the proposed Viterbi decoder is tested via the software simulation.