The turbo codes are a well known channel coding technique widely used because of their outstanding error decoding performance close to the Shannon limit. These codes were proposed using a clever pragmatic approach where a set of concepts that had been previously introduced, together with the iterative processing of data, are successfully combined to obtain close to optimal decoding performance capabilities. However, precisely because this iterative processing, high latency values appear and the achievable decoder throughput is limited. At the beginning of our research activities, the fastest turbo decoder architecture introduced in the literature achieved a throughput peak value around 700 Mbit/s. There were also several works that proposed architectures capable of achieving throughput values around 100 Mbit/s. Research opportunities were then available in order to establish architectural solutions that enable the decoding at a few Gbit/s, so that the industrial requirements are fulfilled and future high performance digital communication systems can be conceived. The first part of this work is devoted to the study of the turbo codes at an algorithmic level. Several SISO decoder algorithms are explored, and different parallel turbo decoder techniques are analyzed. The convergence of parallel turbo decoder is specially considered. To this end the EXtrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) charts are used. Conclusions derived from these kind of diagrams have served to propose a novel SISO decoder schedule to be used in shuffled turbo decoder architectures. The architectural issues when implementing high parallel turbo decoder are considered in the second part of this thesis. We propose a high throughput low complexity radix-16 SISO decoder. This decoder is intended to break the bottleneck that appears because of the recursive operations in the heart of the turbo decoding algorithm. The design of this architecture was possible thanks to the elimination of parallel paths in a radix-16 trellis diagram transition. The proposed SISO decoder implements a high speed radix-8 Add Compare Select (ACS) unit which exhibits a lower hardware complexity and lower critical path compared with a radix-16 ACS unit. Our radix-16 SISO decoder degrades the turbo decoder error correcting performance. Therefore, we have proposed two techniques so that the architecture can be used in practical applications. Thus, architectural solutions to build high parallel turbo decoder architectures, which integrate our SISO decoder, are presented. Finally, a methodology to efficiently explore the design space of parallel turbo decoder architectures is described. The main objective of this approach is to reduce the time to market constraint by designing turbo decoder architectures for a given throughput.