Low Power Design of Turbo Decoder Module with Exploration of Energy-Performance Trade-offs

Turbo coding has become an attractive scheme for design of current communication systems, providing near optimal bit error rates for data transmission at low signal to noise ratios. However, it is as yet unsuitable for use in mobile systems owing to the high energy consumption of current implementations of the scheme. Due to the data dominated nature of the decoder, a memory organization providing sufficient bandwidth is the main bottleneck for energy. We have developed the Data Transfer and Storage Exploration methodology to optimize and trade off energy consumption and performance. This paper discusses the exploration of the cycle budget versus energy trade-off for the turbo decoder module, which was obtained using our storage cycle budget distribution tool.