  The maximal rate for non-square Complex Orthogonal Designs (CODs) with $n$
transmit antennas is ${1/2}+\frac{1}{n}$ if $n$ is even and
${1/2}+\frac{1}{n+1}$ if $n$ is odd, which are close to 1/2 for large values of
$n.$ A class of maximal rate non-square CODs have been constructed by Liang
(IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, 2003) and Lu et. al. (IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory,
2005) have shown that the decoding delay of the codes given by Liang, can be
reduced by 50% when number of transmit antennas is a multiple of 4. Adams et.
al. (IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, 2007) have shown that the designs of Liang are
of minimal-delay for $n$ equal to 1 and 3 modulo 4 and that of Lu et.al. are of
minimal delay when $n$ is a multiple of $4.$ However, these minimal delays are
large compared to the delays of the rate 1/2 non-square CODs constructed by
Tarokh et al (IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, 1999) from rate-1 real orthogonal
designs (RODs). In this paper, we construct a class of rate-1/2 non-square CODs
for any $n$ with the decoding delay equal to 50% of that of the delay of the
rate-1/2 codes given by Tarokh et al. This is achieved by giving first a
general construction of rate-1 square Real Orthogonal Designs (RODs) which
includes as special cases the well known constructions of Adams, Lax and
Phillips and Geramita and Pullman, and then making use of it to obtain the
desired rate-1/2 non-square COD. For the case of 9 transmit antennas, our
rate-1/2 COD is shown to be of minimal-delay. The proposed construction results
in designs with zero entries which may have high Peak-to-Average Power Ratio
(PAPR) and it is shown that by appropriate postmultiplication, a design with no
zero entries can be obtained with no change in the code parameters.
