HIGH THROUGHPUT, PARALLEL, SCALABLE LDPC ENCODER/DECODER ARCHITECTURE FOR OFDM SYSTEMS

This paper presents a high throughput, parallel, scalable and irregular LDPC coding and decoding system hardware implementation that supports twelve combinations of block lengths 648, 1296, 1944 bits and code rates 1/2, 2/3, 3/4, 5/6 based on IEEE 802.11n standard. Based on architecture-aware LDPC codes, we propose an efficient joint LDPC coding and decoding hardware architecture. The prototype architecture is being implemented on FPGA and tested over the air on our wireless OFDM testbed, which is a highly capable, scalable and extensible platform for advanced wireless research. The ASIC resource requirements of the decoder are reported and a trade-off between pipelined and non-pipelined implementation is describe

Single-Scan Min-Sum Algorithms for Fast Decoding of LDPC Codes

Many implementations for decoding LDPC codes are based on the (normalized/offset) min-sum algorithm due to its satisfactory performance and simplicity in operations. Usually, each iteration of the min-sum algorithm contains two scans, the horizontal scan and the vertical scan. This paper presents a single-scan version of the min-sum algorithm to speed up the decoding process. It can also reduce memory usage or wiring because it only needs the addressing from check nodes to variable nodes while the original min-sum algorithm requires that addressing plus the addressing from variable nodes to check nodes. To cut down memory usage or wiring further, another version of the single-scan min-sum algorithm is presented where the messages of the algorithm are represented by single bit values instead of using fixed point ones. The software implementation has shown that the single-scan min-sum algorithm is more than twice as fast as the original min-sum algorithm.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Information Theory Workshop, Chengdu, China, 200

A survey of FPGA-based LDPC decoders

Low-Density Parity Check (LDPC) error correction decoders have become popular in communications systems, as a benefit of their strong error correction performance and their suitability to parallel hardware implementation. A great deal of research effort has been invested into LDPC decoder designs that exploit the flexibility, the high processing speed and the parallelism of Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices. FPGAs are ideal for design prototyping and for the manufacturing of small-production-run devices, where their in-system programmability makes them far more cost-effective than Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs). However, the FPGA-based LDPC decoder designs published in the open literature vary greatly in terms of design choices and performance criteria, making them a challenge to compare. This paper explores the key factors involved in FPGA-based LDPC decoder design and presents an extensive review of the current literature. In-depth comparisons are drawn amongst 140 published designs (both academic and industrial) and the associated performance trade-offs are characterised, discussed and illustrated. Seven key performance characteristics are described, namely their processing throughput, latency, hardware resource requirements, error correction capability, processing energy efficiency, bandwidth efficiency and flexibility. We offer recommendations that will facilitate fairer comparisons of future designs, as well as opportunities for improving the design of FPGA-based LDPC decoder

Area and energy efficient VLSI architectures for low-density parity-check decoders using an on-the-fly computation

The VLSI implementation complexity of a low density parity check (LDPC) decoder is largely influenced by the interconnect and the storage requirements. This dissertation presents the decoder architectures for regular and irregular LDPC codes that provide substantial gains over existing academic and commercial implementations. Several structured properties of LDPC codes and decoding algorithms are observed and are used to construct hardware implementation with reduced processing complexity. The proposed architectures utilize an on-the-fly computation paradigm which permits scheduling of the computations in a way that the memory requirements and re-computations are reduced. Using this paradigm, the run-time configurable and multi-rate VLSI architectures for the rate compatible array LDPC codes and irregular block LDPC codes are designed. Rate compatible array codes are considered for DSL applications. Irregular block LDPC codes are proposed for IEEE 802.16e, IEEE 802.11n, and IEEE 802.20. When compared with a recent implementation of an 802.11n LDPC decoder, the proposed decoder reduces the logic complexity by 6.45x and memory complexity by 2x for a given data throughput. When compared to the latest reported multi-rate decoders, this decoder design has an area efficiency of around 5.5x and energy efficiency of 2.6x for a given data throughput. The numbers are normalized for a 180nm CMOS process. Properly designed array codes have low error floors and meet the requirements of magnetic channel and other applications which need several Gbps of data throughput. A high throughput and fixed code architecture for array LDPC codes has been designed. No modification to the code is performed as this can result in high error floors. This parallel decoder architecture has no routing congestion and is scalable for longer block lengths. When compared to the latest fixed code parallel decoders in the literature, this design has an area efficiency of around 36x and an energy efficiency of 3x for a given data throughput. Again, the numbers are normalized for a 180nm CMOS process. In summary, the design and analysis details of the proposed architectures are described in this dissertation. The results from the extensive simulation and VHDL verification on FPGA and ASIC design platforms are also presented

Improve the Usability of Polar Codes: Code Construction, Performance Enhancement and Configurable Hardware

Error-correcting codes (ECC) have been widely used for forward error correction (FEC) in modern communication systems to dramatically reduce the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) needed to achieve a given bit error rate (BER). Newly invented polar codes have attracted much interest because of their capacity-achieving potential, efficient encoder and decoder implementation, and flexible architecture design space.This dissertation is aimed at improving the usability of polar codes by providing a practical code design method, new approaches to improve the performance of polar code, and a configurable hardware design that adapts to various specifications. State-of-the-art polar codes are used to achieve extremely low error rates. In this work, high-performance FPGA is used in prototyping polar decoders to catch rare-case errors for error-correcting performance verification and error analysis. To discover the polarization characteristics and error patterns of polar codes, an FPGA emulation platform for belief-propagation (BP) decoding is built by a semi-automated construction flow. The FPGA-based emulation achieves significant speedup in large-scale experiments involving trillions of data frames. The platform is a key enabler of this work. The frozen set selection of polar codes, known as bit selection, is critical to the error-correcting performance of polar codes. A simulation-based in-order bit selection method is developed to evaluate the error rate of each bit using Monte Carlo simulations. The frozen set is selected based on the bit reliability ranking. The resulting code construction exhibits up to 1 dB coding gain with respect to the conventional bit selection. To further improve the coding gain of BP decoder for low-error-rate applications, the decoding error mechanisms are studied and analyzed, and the errors are classified based on their distinct signatures. Error detection is enabled by low-cost CRC concatenation, and post-processing algorithms targeting at each type of the error is designed to mitigate the vast majority of the decoding errors. The post-processor incurs only a small implementation overhead, but it provides more than an order of magnitude improvement of the error-correcting performance. The regularity of the BP decoder structure offers many hardware architecture choices. Silicon area, power consumption, throughput and latency can be traded to reach the optimal design points for practical use cases. A comprehensive design space exploration reveals several practical architectures at different design points. The scalability of each architecture is also evaluated based on the implementation candidates. For dynamic communication channels, such as wireless channels in the upcoming 5G applications, multiple codes of different lengths and code rates are needed to t varying channel conditions. To minimize implementation cost, a universal decoder architecture is proposed to support multiple codes through hardware reuse. A 40nm length- and rate-configurable polar decoder ASIC is demonstrated to fit various communication environments and service requirements.PHDElectrical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/140817/1/shuangsh_1.pd

Research on high performance LDPC decoder

制度:新 ; 報告番号:甲3272号 ; 学位の種類:博士(工学) ; 授与年月日:2011/3/15 ; 早大学位記番号:新557