Efficient Highly-Parallel Decoder Architecture for Quasi-Cyclic Low-Density Parity-Check Codes

Abstract

In this paper, the authors propose an efficient highly-parallel decoder architecture using partially overlapped decoding scheme for quasi-cyclic (QC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, which leads to reduction in hardware complexity and power consumption. Generally, due to the regularly structured parity-check matrix H of QC LDPC codes, the message updating computations in the check node unit (CNU) and the variable node unit (VNU) can be efficiently overlapped, which increases the decoding throughput by maximizing the hardware utilization efficiency (HUE). However, the partially overlapped decoding scheme cannot be used to design a highly-parallel decoding architecture for high-throughput applications. For (3, 5)-regular QC LDPC codes, our proposed method could reduce the hardware complexity by approximately 33% for the CNU and 20% for the VNU in the highly-parallel decoder architecture without any performance degradation. In addition, the power consumption can be minimized by reducing the total number of memory accesses for updated messages.