Design and implementation of efficient VLSI solutions for 3G and 4G mobile communications

In recent years, the global success of mobile communication devices (in particular, smartphones) has led to rapidly evolving mobile communication standards enabling ever higher data rates. Not only are new generations of standards being developed at a constantly increasing pace, the capabilities of existing standards are continuously enhanced via amendments and new releases. This puts a strain on the digital receiver implementation: the new functionality has to be supported while energy and silicon area remain equally limited. This thesis explores the design and implementation of digital baseband receivers, focusing two main application areas: channel estimation and equalization for 3G, the currently most widely deployed generation of mobile networks and turbo decoder design for LTE-Advanced, a high-throughput 4-th generation standard.