Abstract
In this thesis, the design and implementation of STTC decoder architecture for wireless multiple-input multi-output (MIMO) communications are introduced. Viterbi algorithm is the basic technique for space-time trellis codes (STTC) decoding but the proposed architecture aims to perform massive operations over wireless MIMO channels and improve computational complexity of Viterbi algorithm. Moreover, the computational complexity also increases significantly if the number of antennas and the order of modulation increase. To reduce the computational burden, we propose a new method to compute the branch metrics in the geometric view. Furthermore, more complexity reduction can be achieved when more antennas and higher order of modulation are applied. In addition, 4-input magnitude comparator is implement to improve throughput in this thesis. If the SNR of AWGN channel is bigger than 6 dB, we can observe that the performance of 4-input magnitude comparator is close to the performance of tradition 2-input magnitude comparator. Therefore, the proposed method will make the implementation of high-order modulation, large antenna number, and high complexity space-time code possible for next generation communication systems.