Miscorrection Mitigation for Generalized Integrated Interleaved BCH Codes

Abstract

The generalized integrated interleaved (GII) codes nest BCH sub-codewords to form codewords of more powerful BCH codes. They can achieve hyper-throughput decoding with excellent error-correcting performance and are among the most suitable codes for next-generation memories. However, the new storage class memories require high code rate and short codeword length. In this case, the sub-codewords have small correction capability. The miscorrections of the sub-codewords lead to much more severe degradation on the GII error-correcting performance compared to the miscorrections of classic BCH codes. This letter investigates the miscorrections in GII decoding. Three low-complexity methods are developed to identify and mitigate the miscorrections by utilizing the nested syndromes, adding one single parity to each sub-codeword, and keeping track of the error locator polynomial degree. Besides, formulas for estimating the miscorrection rates are given. Using the proposed mitigation methods, the actual GII decoding performance becomes very close to that of the case without any miscorrections.