Reconfigurable detector architectures using conventional and on-line arithmetic for mobile communication receivers

This paper presents two different detector architectures that have varying benefits with Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) at the receiver. Soft decisions (high precision output from the detector) are needed by the decoder for low SNR while hard decisions can be used to attain higher data rates in case of high SNR or voice. A conventional arithmetic detector using carry save adders for soft decisions is first presented that achieves a 2.12 Area-Time (AT) improvement against a base case conventional arithmetic implementation. For hard decision outputs, a truncated on-line arithmetic detector is presented that attains a 3.94 AT improvement against the same implementation for an 8 bit input precision (with quadratic benefits with increasing input precision). A mobile communication receiver can thus reconfigure between these two different proposed architectures to attain 1.62 3.94 higher data rates depending on the SNR. This technique can also be applied to reconfigure the implementation of other receiver algorithms such as the decoder. Submitted to 36th Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers, Nov 2002