250 MBit/s 64-state soft-decision Viterbi decoder on a cell CPU

A 64-state soft-decision Viterbi algorithm implementation on a Cell CPU running at 2.8 GHz is presented, which achieves a throughput of 250 MBit/s, 500 MBit/s encoded data, where the 8 SPU cores process different packets in parallel. Evaluations are done using the IEEE 802.11a, WiMAX and DVB code polynomials. The implementation is done in C language using the GNU C compiler. The code uses optimizations like instruction level parallelism, loop unrolling and indepent processor pipelines.