A flexible FPGA-based quasi-cyclic LDPC decoder

Abstract

Low-Density Parity Check (LDPC) error correction decoders have become popular in diverse communications systems, owing to their strong error correction performance and their suitability to parallel hardware implementation. A great deal of research effort has been invested into the implementation of LDPC decoder designs on Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices, in order to exploit their high processing speed, parallelism and re-programmability. Meanwhile, a variety of Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) implementations of multi-mode LDPC decoders exhibiting both inter-standard and intra-standard reconfiguration flexibility are available in the open literature. However, the high complexity of the adaptable routing and processing elements that are required by a flexible LDPC decoder has resulted in a lack of viable FPGA-based implementations. Hence in this work, we propose a parameterisable FPGA-based LDPC decoder architecture, which supports run-time flexibility over any set of one or more Quasi-Cyclic (QC) LDPC codes. Additionally, we propose an offline design flow, which may be used to automatically generate an optimised HDL description of our decoder, having support for a chosen selection of codes. Our implementation results show that the proposed architecture achieves a high level of design-time and run-time flexibility, whilst maintaining a reasonable processing throughput, hardware resource requirement and error correction performance.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Robert Maunder: orcid.org/0000-0002-7944-2615

ORCID for Lajos Hanzo: orcid.org/0000-0002-2636-5214

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