Architectural considerations for rate-flexible trellis processing blocks

A flexible channel decoding platform should be able to operate in varying communication scenarios, and different code rates have to be supported. Therefore, we present a framework that allows efficient processing of rate-flexible trellises. Using a fundamental computational unit for trellis-based decoding, formal principles are obtained to emulate more complex trellises. In a design example, such a computational block supports both rate 1/c convolutional codes and set partition codes with subset selectors of rate 2/3. Synthesis results show the hardware requirements for two different architectural approache