This study proposes an energy-efficient and area-efficient dual-path low-density parity-check (LDPC) with Reed–Solomon (RS) decoder for communication systems. Hardware complexity is reduced by applying a dual-path 2-bit modified layered min-sum algorithm (2M-LMSA) to a (2550, 2040) quasi-cyclic LDPC (QC-LDPC) code with the column and row weights of 3 and 15, respectively. The simplified check node units (CNUs) reduce memory and routing complexity as well as the energy needed to decode each bit. A throughput of 11 Gb/s is achieved by using 90-nm CMOS technology at a clock frequency of 208 MHz at 0.9 V with average power of 244 mW on a chip area of 3.05 mm2. Decoding performance is further improved by appending the (255, 239) RS decoder after the LDPC decoder. The LDPC plus RS decoder consumes the power of 434 mW on the area of 3.45 mm2.
LDPC Decoder with an Adaptive Wordwidth Datapath for Energy and BER Co-Optimization
