VLSI Design for Low-Density Parity-Check Code Decoding

Abstract

Low-Density Parity-check (LDPC) code, being one of the most promising near-Shannon limit error correction codes (ECCs) in practice, has attracted tremendous attention in both academia and industry since its rediscovery in middle 1990's. Owning excellent coding gain, LDPC code also has very low error floor, and inherent parallizable decoding schemes. Compared to other ECCs such as Turbo codes, BCH codes and RS codes, LDPC code has many more varieties in code construction, which result in various optimum decoding architectures associated with different structures of the parity-check matrix. In this work, we first provide an overview of typical LDPC code structures and commonly-used LDPC decoding algorithms. We then discuss efficient VLSI architectures for random-like codes and structured LDPC codes. We further present layered decoding schemes and corresponding VLSI architectures. Finally we briefly address non-binary LDPC decoding and multi-rate LDPC decoder design.