Low-Power Implementation of a High-Throughput LDPC Decoder for IEEE 802.11n Standard

Abstract

A flexible and scalable LDPC decoder architecture is developed for the IEEE 802.11n standard. A serial-parallel architecture is employed for achieving high throughput with low chip area, and triple-bank memory blocks are used for parallel factor expansion. Two low-power strategies using voltage over-scaling (VOS) and reduced-precision replica (RPR) are applied to the decoder. Power saving of up to 35% is demonstrated when implemented in a 90nm CMOS technology.