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Energy Efficient Turbo Decoding for 3G Mobile

01 January 2001

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Turbo decoding provides phenomenal channel decoding performance close to the Shannon limit, but the performance comes at a cost of computation and power consumption. Turbo decoding has been incorporated into 3G mobile wireless standards, forcing handset designers to consider the high power consumption issues in their implementations. This paper looks at methods of substantially reducing the power consumption for turbo decoding, making it feasible to integrate turbo decoders into low power handsets. The techniques presented include early termination of the turbo process, encoding of extrinsic information to reduce the memory size, and disabling portions of the MAP algorithm when the results will not affect the decoded output. The net result of these techniques is over a 2/3 reduction in power over a fixed 6 iteration, 8-state baseline turbo decoder at a 2 dB signal to noise ratio (SNR).