A 2.56 Gb/s soft RS (255,239) decoder chip for optical communication systems

Chih Hsiang Hsu*, Yi Min Lin, Hsie-Chia Chang, Chen-Yi Lee

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

    7 Scopus citations

    Abstract

    Due to the increasing uncertainty of data for higher transmission rate, the Forward Error Correction (FEC) devices need to provide more powerful error correcting capability for optical communication systems. As compared with traditional hard RS decoders, the soft RS decoders can perform substantial coding gain but require much higher hardware complexity. In this paper, a decision-confined algorithm is proposed to enhance the error correcting performance with an area-efficient architecture. The novelty is that, instead of decoding numerous possible transmitted codewords and choosing the most likely one, only one candidate sequence will be decoded after confining the degree of error-locator polynomial Λ(x). For RS (255,239) codes, simulation results confirm that our approach provides 0.4 dB performance gain at 10-4 CER over the hard RS decoders. The experimental result reveals that our soft decoder can achieve 2.56 Gb/s throughput in standard CMOS 90 nm technology while having similar complexity as a hard decoder. It can fit well for 10-40 Gb/s with 16 RS decoders in optical fiber systems and 2.5 Gb/s GPON applications.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationESSCIRC 2011 - Proceedings of the 37th European Solid-State Circuits Conference
    Pages79-82
    Number of pages4
    DOIs
    StatePublished - 12 Dec 2011
    Event37th European Solid-State Circuits Conference, ESSCIRC 2011 - Helsinki, Finland
    Duration: 12 Sep 201116 Sep 2011

    Publication series

    NameEuropean Solid-State Circuits Conference
    ISSN (Print)1930-8833

    Conference

    Conference37th European Solid-State Circuits Conference, ESSCIRC 2011
    Country/TerritoryFinland
    CityHelsinki
    Period12/09/1116/09/11

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