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IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I Regular Papers

Flexible High Throughput QC-LDPC Decoder With Perfect Pipeline Conflicts Resolution and Efficient Hardware Utilization

Vladimir L. Petrović, Milos M. Markovic, Dragomir El Mezeni, Lazar V. Saranovac, Andreja Radošević

Published Aug 27, 2020• 67 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Modern communication standards, such as 5G new radio (5G NR), require a high speed decoder for highly irregular quasi-cyclic low density parity check (QC-LDPC) codes. A widely used approach in QC-LDPC decoders is a layered decoding schedule which processes the parity check matrix in parts, thus providing faster convergence. However, pipelined layered decoding architecture suffers from data hazards that reduce the throughput. This paper presents a novel architecture, which can facilitate any QC-LDPC decoding without stall cycles caused by pipeline hazards. The decoder conveniently incorporates both the layered and the flooding schedules in cases when hazards occur. The paper also presents the genetic algorithm based optimization of the decoding schedule for better signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) performance. The proposed architecture enables insertion of a large number of pipeline stages, thus providing high operating frequency. As a case study, the FPGA implementation for WiMAX, DVB-S2X, and 5G NR provided coded throughput of up to 1.77 Gbps, 4.32 Gbps, and 4.92 Gbps at 10 iterations, respectively. The results show a strong throughput increase of 30%-109% compared with the conventional layered decoder for 5G NR for the same SNR performance. The decoder provides highly efficient utilization of resources when compared with the state-of-the-art solutions.

DOI
10.1109/tcsi.2020.3018048

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IEEE Transactions on Circuits & Systems II Express Briefs•Apr 9, 2021•11 citations
Modern communication standards, such as 5G new radio (5G NR), require a high speed decoder for highly irregular quasi-cyclic low density parity check (QC-LDPC) codes. A widely used approach in QC-LDPC decoders is a layered decoding schedule which processes the parity check matrix in parts, thus providing faster convergence. However, pipelined layered decoding architecture suffers from data hazards that reduce the throughput. This paper presents a novel architecture, which can facilitate any QC-LDPC decoding without stall cycles caused by pipeline hazards. The decoder conveniently incorporates both the layered and the flooding schedules in cases when hazards occur. The paper also presents the genetic algorithm based optimization of the decoding schedule for better signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) performance. The proposed architecture enables insertion of a large number of pipeline stages, thus providing high operating frequency. As a case study, the FPGA implementation for WiMAX, DVB-S2X, and 5G NR provided coded throughput of up to 1.77 Gbps, 4.32 Gbps, and 4.92 Gbps at 10 iterations, respectively. The results show a strong throughput increase of 30%-109% compared with the conventional layered decoder for 5G NR for the same SNR performance. The decoder provides highly efficient utilization of resources when compared with the state-of-the-art solutions.
A high-throughput layered decoder for quasi-cyclic (QC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes is required for communication systems. The preferred way to improve the throughput is to insert pipeline stages and increase the operating frequency, which suffers from pipeline conflicts at the same time. A priority-based layered schedule is proposed to keep the updates of log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) as frequent as possible when pipeline conflicts happen. To reduce pipeline conflicts, we also propose double update queues for layered decoders. The proposed double update queues improve the percentage of updated LLRs per iteration. Benefitting from these, the performance loss of the proposed decoder for the fifth generation (5G) new radio (NR) is reduced from 0.6 dB to 0.2 dB using the same quantization compared with the state-of-the-art work. As a result, the throughput of the proposed decoder improved up to 2.85 times when the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) was equal to 5.9 dB.
This paper presents a pipelined layered quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (QC-LDPC) decoder architecture targeting low-complexity, high-throughput, and efficient use of hardware resources compliant with the specifications of 5G new radio (NR) wireless communication standard. First, a combined min-sum (CMS) decoding algorithm, which is a combination of the offset min-sum and the original min-sum algorithm, is proposed. Then, a low-complexity and high-throughput pipelined layered QC-LDPC decoder architecture for enhanced mobile broadband specifications in 5G NR wireless standards based on CMS algorithm with pipeline layered scheduling is presented. Enhanced versions of check node-based processor architectures are proposed to improve the complexity of the LDPC decoders. An efficient minimum-finder for the check node unit architecture that reduces the hardware required for the computation of the first two minima is introduced. Moreover, a low complexity a posteriori information update unit architecture, which only requires one adder array for their operations, is presented. The proposed architecture shows significant improvements in terms of area and throughput compared to other QC-LDPC decoder architectures available in the literature.
In this study, a scheduling policy of layered decoding for quasi-cycle (QC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes with high throughput and good performance is designed. The influence of scheduling on the delay of the decoder's hardware implementation and on the decoding performance are considered simultaneously. Specifically, we analyze the idle time required under various scheduling sequences within a pipelined decoding architecture and formulate the problem as a traveling salesman problem (TSP) aiming at minimizing idle time. Furthermore, considering that different scheduling sequences can affect decoding performance, we refine the graph used to solve the TSP based on scheduling characteristics that promote improved decoding outcomes. Simulation results demonstrate that the identified scheduling sequence achieves a low number of hardware delays while maintaining excellent decoding performance for 5G New Radio (NR) LDPC codes.
Quasi-cyclic low density parity check (QC-LDPC) is widely used in various modern communication standards due to its excellent performance and convenient hardware implementation, but its commonly used pipelined layered decoder faces update conflicts that lead to performance degradation. This letter proposes a shortcut-based decoder to mitigate this problem. When the conflicts occur, we avoid the read/write operations of the log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) and abandon the use of the barrel shifters, and feed those LLRs directly to the next layer. we also attempt to utilize the latest messages for inevitable conflicts. Moreover, the proposed architecture significantly reduces the possibility of conflicts by reordering the base graph matrix (BGM) with a shorter update interval of LLRs, which can achieve maximum utilization in the updated messages. Compared to the state-of-the-art approach in the case of DVB-S2, the proposed architecture can deliver up to 0.25 dB performance gain with faster convergence.
In this paper, we present a new microarchitecture of low-density parity-check (LDPC) decoder compliant to the specifications of 5G new-radio (NR) wireless-communication standard. This work suggests a fully-parallel VLSI architecture for this decoder to achieve high throughput. The digital architecture of internal modules as well as system-level design of the LDPC decoder are presented here. The comprehensive bit-error-rate (BER) performance analyses of our LDPC decoder has been performed in additive-white Gaussian-noise (AWGN) channel environment for various number of decoding iterations and bit-quantization. It delivers a BER of 10-6at 1 dB of Eb/N0while decoding for 10 iterations with 7-bits quantization. In addition, FPGA implementation and post-route simulation of the proposed LDPC decoder are carried out that can decode an encoded LDPC code of 26112 code-length for 1/3 code-rate. Our decoder has achieved a throughput of 2.9 Gbps while operating at a clock frequency of 102 MHz. These implementation results are compared with the reported works where our design delivered 20× better throughput compared to the state-of-the-art LDPC decoders.
This brief proposes hardware-friendly QC-LDPC decoding algorithm with layered scheduling based on new logarithmic-likelihood-ratio compound (LLRC) segregation technique. Subsequently, we present hardware-efficient QC-LDPC decoder-architecture based on the proposed algorithm and additional architectural optimizations. This decoder has been designed based on the 5G-NR specifications, supporting code-lengths and code-rates in the ranges of 26112-10368 bits and 1/3-8/9, respectively. Performance analysis has shown that suggested LLRC-segregation based decoding algorithm delivers adequate FER of 10-5between 1 to 6.5 dB of SNR range. Furthermore, proposed QC-LDPC decoder is post-route simulated and implemented on the FPGA platform. It operates at a maximum clock frequency of 135 MHz and delivers a peak throughput of 11.02 Gbps. Eventually, comparison with relevant works shows that our decoder delivers 2.2× higher throughput and 8.3× better hardware-efficiency than the state-of-the-art implementations.