Abstract: This paper takes engineering implementation as a goal,anddeals mainly with the compression of the blanch metric in the hardwareimplementation of 8-level (3-bits) soft-decision Viterbi decoder for theR=1/2,K=7 convolutional code. This paper presents a solution to theproblem and the experiment data of the Viterbi decoder prototype.

Key words: Term Convolutional code, Decoding algorithm, Branch metric, Method