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IEEE Asia Pacific Conference on Circuits and Systems (APCCAS)

A layered QC-LDPC decoder architecture for high speed communication system

Chiu‐Wing Sham, Xu Chen, Wai M. Tam, Yue Zhao, Francis C. M. Lau

Published Dec 1, 2012• 35 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The performance of a high-throughput long-distance communication system such as an optical transmission system is limited by the Net Coding Gain (NCG) of the Forward Error Correction (FEC) system. Summarizing the previous research works, Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes form one of the most promising FEC schemes to be applied in high-throughput communication systems. Designing a practical channel coding scheme with high code rate, low complexity, high throughput and extremely low error floor has always been a very challenging problem. Quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (QC-LDPC) codes have been promising candidates to fulfill the above requirements but the implementation issues remain. In this paper, we propose a layered QC-LDPC decoder architecture with high code rate, low complexity, high throughput and excellent error performance. The architecture has been implemented using FPGA and the error performance has been shown to be good.

DOI
10.1109/apccas.2012.6419075

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The performance of a high-throughput long-distance communication system such as an optical transmission system is limited by the Net Coding Gain (NCG) of the Forward Error Correction (FEC) system. Summarizing the previous research works, Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes form one of the most promising FEC schemes to be applied in high-throughput communication systems. Designing a practical channel coding scheme with high code rate, low complexity, high throughput and extremely low error floor has always been a very challenging problem. Quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (QC-LDPC) codes have been promising candidates to fulfill the above requirements but the implementation issues remain. In this paper, we propose a layered QC-LDPC decoder architecture with high code rate, low complexity, high throughput and excellent error performance. The architecture has been implemented using FPGA and the error performance has been shown to be good.
Forward error correction is as one of the key technologies enabling the next-generation high-speed fiber optical communications. Quasi-cyclic (QC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes have been considered as one of the promising candidates due to their large coding gain performance and low implementation complexity. In this paper, we present our designed QC-LDPC code with girth 10 and 25% overhead based on pairwise balanced design. By FPGAbased emulation, we demonstrate that the 5-bit soft-decision LDPC decoder can achieve 11.8dB net coding gain with no error floor at BER of 10-15 avoiding using any outer code or post-processing method. We believe that the proposed single QC-LDPC code is a promising solution for 400Gb/s optical communication systems and beyond.
Powerful forward error correction codes such as quasi-cyclic low density parity check (QC-LDPC) are required in next-generation coherent optical communication systems [1]. This work describes the design and experimental verification of a high net coding gain (NCG), low complexity QC-LDPC code. Towards this end, we develop a field programmable gate array (FPGA) based platform specially designed for optimization and performance evaluation of LDPC codes. The proposed FPGA framework includes several features such as the capability of changing the internal resolution of the decoder algorithm or capturing error patterns for error-floor analysis. Experimental results derived from the FPGA platform show that the designed QC-LDPC code is able to achieve an NCG of 11.6 dB at a bit-error-rate (BER) of 10-15with an overhead of 25% and a codeword length of only 16K bits.
In this paper, we propose a new class of quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (QC-LDPC) codes, namely cyclically-coupled QC-LDPC (CC-QC-LDPC) codes, and their RAM-based decoder architecture. CC-QC-LDPC codes have a simple structure and are constructed by cyclically-coupling a number of QC-LDPC subcodes. They can achieve throughput and error performance as excellent as LDPC convolutional codes, but with much lower hardware requirements. They are therefore promising candidates for future generations of communication systems such as long-haul optical communication systems. In particular, a rate-5/6 CC-QC-LDPC decoder has been implemented onto a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and it achieves a throughput of 3.0 Gb/s at 100 MHz clock rate with 10-iteration decoding. No error floor is observed up to anEb/N0E_{b}/N_{0}Eb​/N0​of 3.50 dB, where all1.14×10161.14\times 10^{16}1.14×1016transmitted bits have been decoded correctly.
Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes have traditionally performed better at longer code lengths. This research develops and rigorously evaluates a layered Quasi-Cyclic Low-Density Parity-Check (QC-LDPC) decoder architecture intended for Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC) applications in 5G and subsequent technologies. The paper investigates LDPC codes in short-length contexts through architectural optimization based on a layered decoding approach, which provides improved convergence speed and reduced latency compared with traditional flooding techniques. The short block-length QC-LDPC code (280,176) addresses the dual challenge of achieving ultra-low latency while maintaining high performance relative to existing work. For a target BLER of 10−2, the decoder outperforms the shorter reference codes (60,40) and (96,64), with an Eb/N0 gain of up to 0.9 dB, part of which is attributable to the longer block length rather than to the decoder alone. The FPGA implementation results demonstrate that the design is hardware-efficient: it operates at a maximum frequency of 218.62 MHz, resulting in a throughput of 155.77 Mbps, while maintaining a decoding latency of only 1.129 µs and a power consumption of 0.201 W.
Forward error correcting codes are successfully implemented in high speed communication for error-free transmission with high data rate. One such code is Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) code. In this paper, Quasi Cyclic (QC) construction of LDPC code is used and we investigate the performance of various decoding algorithms of QC-LDPC code. Their performances in terms of error correction and complexity are compared. The speed of convergence of various decoding algorithms of LDPC code is analyzed by using the Density Evolution theory. With this thresholding in iterations, the BER performances of different algorithms are simulated. Our results show that the same BER performance can be achieved with reduced number of iterations or the speed of the system can be improved without much sacrifice in BER performance.
This paper studies low-complexity high-speed decoder architectures for quasi-cyclic low density parity check (QC-LDPC) codes. Algorithmic transformation and architectural level optimization are incorporated to reduce the critical path. Enhanced partially parallel decoding architectures are proposed to linearly increase the throughput of conventional partially parallel decoders through introducing a small percentage of extra hardware. Based on the proposed architectures, a (8176, 7154) Euclidian geometry-based QC-LDPC code decoder is implemented on Xilinx field programmable gate array (FPGA) Virtex-II 6000, where an efficient nonuniform quantization scheme is employed to reduce the size of memories storing soft messages. FPGA implementation results show that the proposed decoder can achieve a maximum (source data) decoding throughput of 172 Mb/s at 15 iterations