Comparative Analysis of On-Chip FPGA Memory Architectures for Viterbi Decoder Implementation in DVB Systems

Mosbeh, Asmaa; Younis, Ali; Mostafa, Hassan; Yousef, Khalil

doi:10.21608/jesaun.2025.344883.1393

Comparative Analysis of On-Chip FPGA Memory Architectures for Viterbi Decoder Implementation in DVB Systems

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

¹ Electrical Engineering Dept., Faculty of Engineering, Assiut University, Assiut, Egypt

² Electrical Engineering Dept., University of Waterloo, Canada

10.21608/jesaun.2025.344883.1393

Abstract

High-definition Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) systems demand high data rates, resulting in increased hardware complexity and power consumption, with the Viterbi decoder (VD) being a key contributor. The substantial memory resources required for these high data rates drive this research, which investigates the impact of diverse static random-access memory (SRAM) architectures on Zynq FPGA and their embedded memory resources, aiming to design power-efficient and less complex Viterbi decoders. Besides, the effect of different memories architectures on the transceiver (Tx-Rx) system has been studied. Viterbi decoder is implemented with different memory architectures on xczu7ev-2ffvc1156: flip flops, distributed RAM, block ram (BRAM), and UltraRAMTM (URAM). BRAM IP from AMD has significantly improved the dynamic power of Viterbi decoder by 97% compared to other available memories. Effectiveness of the employed BRAM is ensured by saving about 50% of the total power of the baseband transceiver system. That Tx-Rx operates at a frequency of 125MHz with a throughput of 62.3 Mbps, a code rate: ½, and 16APSK modulation scheme. Viterbi decoder has achieved a reduction in power compared to sleepy keeper and space time trellis code (STTC) with about 44% and 61% respectively. Functionality of the proposed VD architecture for signal to noise ratio (SNR) of 0 dB at additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel and vector length of 3,264 bits is verified. Hardware validation on ZCU104 based on DVB standard is also done and reported.

Keywords

Main Subjects

Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering and Electrical power and machines engineering.

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