BCH code selection and iterative decoding for BCH and LDPC concatenated coding system

In this letter, we consider a concatenated BCH and QC-LDPC coding system for potential use of data protection on flash memory. Two issues are studied, and strategies to resolve them are proposed. First, in order to guarantee that the concatenated coding system is free from undesired error floor, we propose a strategy to select the outer BCH codes according to the error patterns of inner QC-LDPC code. We next present an iterative decoding algorithm between inner QC-LDPC and outer BCH codes to alleviate the performance degradation in the waterfall region due to code-concatenation rate loss. The two proposals jointly provide a feasible design for the concatenated BCH and QC-LDPC coding system. Simulations to verify the performance of the proposed concatenated coding system design are given at the end.