Analog Sliding Window Decoder Core for Mixed Signal Turbo Decoder

The application of turbo codes in modern communication systems makes decoding a time and power consuming task. It is known that analog decoders are superior to digital decoder designs in terms of speed and power consumption. The fact that a modification of a code parameter like the block length requires a new implementation, in combination with a complexity which grows linearly with the block length, so far prohibits a real world application in e.g., UMTS. This paper introduces a novel mixed signal turbo decoder supporting various block lengths and arbitrary interleaver structures. For the prominent case of the UMTS turbo code the complexity is reduced by a factor of up to 64 compared to an all analog implementation.