| Since the rediscovery of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes in the late 1990s, tremendous progress has been made in code construction and design, decoding algorithms, and decoder implementation of these capacity-approaching codes. Recently, LDPC codes are considered for applications such as high-speed satellite and optical communications, the hard disk drives, and high-density flash memory based storage systems, which require that the codes are free of error-floor down to bit error rate (BER) as low as 10-12 to 10-15. FPGAs are usually used to evaluate the error performance of codes, since one can exploit the finite word length and extremely high internal memory bandwidth of an FPGA. Existing FPGA-based LDPC decoders fail to utilize the configurability and read-first mode of embedded memory in the FPGAs, and thus result in limited throughput and codes sizes. Four optimization techniques, i.e., vectorization, folding, message relocation, and circulant permutation matrix (CPM) sharing, are proposed to improve the throughput, scalability, and efficiency of FPGA-based decoders. Also, a semi-automatic CAD tool called QCSYN (Quasi-Cyclic LDPC decoder SYNthesis) is designed to shorten the implementation time of decoders. Using the above techniques, a high-rate (16129,15372) code is shown to have no error-floor down to the BER of 10-14. Also, it is very difficult to construct codes that do not exhibit an error floor down to 10-15 or so. Without detailed knowledge of dominant trapping sets, a backtracking-based reconfigurable decoder is designed to lower the error floor of a family of structurally compatible quasi-cyclic LDPC codes by one to two orders of magnitudes.;Hardware reconfigurability is another significant feature of LDPC decoders. A tri-mode decoder for the (4095,3367) Euclidean geometry code is designed to work with three compatible binary message passing decoding algorithms. Note that this code contains 262080 edges (21.3 times of the (2048,1723) 10GBASE-T code) in its Tanner graph and is the largest code ever implemented. Besides, an efficient QC-LDPC Shift Network (QSN) is proposed to reduce the interconnect delay and control logic of circular shift network, a core component in the reconfigurable decoder that supports a family of structurally compatible codes. The interconnect delay and control logic area are reduced by a factor of 2.12 and 8, respectively.;Non-binary LDPC codes are effective in combating burst errors. Using the power representation of the elements in the Galois field to organize both intrinsic and extrinsic messages, we present an efficient decoder architecture for non-binary QC-LDPC codes. The proposed decoder is reconfigurable and can be used to decode any code of a given field size. The decoder supports both regular and irregular non-binary QC-LDPC codes. Using a practical metric of throughput per unit area, the proposed implementation outperforms the best implementations published in research literature to date. |
