General approach to implementing analogue Viterbi decoders

Commercial realisations of analogue Viterbi decoder are available for magnetic read channels. However, these implementations are restricted to a particular coding scheme. The authors present a general approach to the implementation of analogue Viterbi decoders having arbitrary coding schemes. The proposed method exploits the ability of simple analogue circuits to perform the required mathematical functions. Simulation results are presented for a 0.8 μm BiCMOS process