A New Signal Detection Method for Spatially Multiplexed MIMO Systems and Its VLSI Implementation

Abstract

This brief proposes a new signal detection method called QR ordered successive interference cancellation (OSIC) with candidates (QOC) method for spatially multiplexed multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems. By using the OSIC algorithm and the maximum-likelihood (ML) metric, the proposed method achieves near-ML performance without requiring a large number of candidates. Although the proposed method can be used for both hard and soft decoding systems, it is particularly useful for soft decoding systems since the log-likelihood-ratio (LLR) values for all the bits can efficiently be computed without using LLR estimation. The proposed method is also suitable for very large scale integration (VLSI) implementation since it leads to a fixed throughput system. A QOC detector for a 4 times4 16-quadrature-amplitude-modulation (16-QAM) MIMO system has been designed and synthesized with a 0.13-mum complimentary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology. The implementation results show that the proposed detector reduces the hardware complexity by 73% relative to a K-best detector.