M. Tech. Electrical Engineering. / Discusses MIMO systems have been hailed for the benefits of enhancing the reliability of the wireless communication link and increasing of the channel capacity, however the complexity of MIMO encoding and decoding algorithms increases considerably with the number of antennas. This research aims to suggest an optimisation approach to a reduced complexity implementation of the Alamouti 4×2 STBC. This is achieved by considering the FPGA parallelisation of the conditionally optimised ML decoding algorithm. The above problem can be divided into two subproblems. 1. The ML decoding of the Double Alamouti 4×2 STBC has a high computational cost when an exhaustive search is performed on the signal constellation for M-ary QAM. 2. Though the conditionally optimised ML decoding leads to less computational complexity compared to the full generic ML detection algorithm, the practical implementation remains unattractive for wireless systems.