5G New Radio (NR) has stringent demands on both performance and complexity
for the design of low-density parity-check (LDPC) decoding algorithms and
corresponding VLSI implementations. Furthermore, decoders must fully support
the wide range of all 5G NR blocklengths and code rates, which is a significant
challenge. In this paper, we present a high-performance and low-complexity LDPC
decoder, tailor-made to fulfill the 5G requirements. First, to close the gap
between belief propagation (BP) decoding and its approximations in hardware, we
propose an extension of adjusted min-sum decoding, called generalized adjusted
min-sum (GA-MS) decoding. This decoding algorithm flexibly truncates the
incoming messages at the check node level and carefully approximates the
non-linear functions of BP decoding to balance the error-rate and hardware
complexity. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed fixed-point GAMS
has only a minor gap of 0.1 dB compared to floating-point BP under various
scenarios of 5G standard specifications. Secondly, we present a fully
reconfigurable 5G NR LDPC decoder implementation based on GA-MS decoding. Given
that memory occupies a substantial portion of the decoder area, we adopt
multiple data compression and approximation techniques to reduce 42.2% of the
memory overhead. The corresponding 28nm FD-SOI ASIC decoder has a core area of
1.823 mm2 and operates at 895 MHz. It is compatible with all 5G NR LDPC codes
and achieves a peak throughput of 24.42 Gbps and a maximum area efficiency of
13.40 Gbps/mm2 at 4 decoding iterations.Comment: 14 pages, 14 figure