An Architectural Study of a Digital Signal Processor for Block Codes

This paper examines architectural issues for a domain specific digital signal processor (DS-DSP) which is capable of fast decoding of block codes. In real time systems it was not possible before to employ common processors for this task because of a lack of architectural and arithmetical support. We proposed solutions for the arithmetical problem in previous work [6]. In this paper we focus on architectures for implementation of different block decoding algorithms on a new DS-DSP architecture. The paper also contains benchmarks for our architecture for some selected codes and compares our DS-DSP to common digital signal processors (DSP) and dedicated logic solutions. 1 1