A list sphere detector (LSD) is an enhancement of a sphere detector (SD) that can be used to approximate the soft output maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) detector used in the detection of the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) signals. The LSD consists of three different parts: the preprocessing unit, the LSD algorithm unit and the log-likelihood ratio (LLR) calculation unit. Architecture design is the key point to enable an efficient implementation of the LSD. In this paper, we design

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... the architecture for the whole detector structure and exploit the parallelism and pipelining possibilities of the presented architecture units. The designed architecture is implemented in a field programmable gate array (FPGA) using Mentor Graphics Catapult C tool. We show that a scalable architecture can be designed for the LSD. The LSD is also shown to be feasible for practical implementation, and the implementation complexity and latency results are presented.