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Generalized integrated interleaved (GII) codes nest a set of linear block codewords to generate codewords belonging to stronger codes. They are among the best error-correcting codes for next-generation hyper-speed digital communications and storage. Serial encoders for GII codes based on BCH codes have been previous investigated. They consist of BCH encoders whose inputs and outputs are multiplied by vectors decided by the nesting scheme. However, parallel GII encoders for high-speed systems cannot be designed by directly extending serial encoders due to the unique feature that BCH codes of different error-correcting capabilities are involved. Moreover, GII decoder complexity and latency can be greatly reduced by sharing the encoder to compute short remainders for syndrome computation. Although previous resource-shareable BCH encoders can be utilized to implement resource-shareable GII encoders, they are all serial. This paper first proposes a low-complexity scheme to handle the different error-correcting capabilities of the involved codes and align the input and parity symbols for parallel processing. Then two efficient parallel resource-shareable BCH encoder architectures to be used as GII encoder components are developed. The first design is achieved by deriving parallel register state update formulas for concatenated linear-feedback shift registers (LFSRs). Through reformulating the remainder polynomial divisions, the second design allows the inputs to be added to different LFSR taps, and accordingly reduces the complexity by a significant portion. For an example 160-parallel GII-BCH encoder considered for Flash memory applications, the second proposed design requires 14% smaller area compared to the first one. Besides both of them lead to around 50% latency reduction in the nested syndrome computation with small area overheads compared to the best possible alternative design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, symmetric block-wise concatenated-BCH (SBC-BCH) codes are proposed as strong error-correcting codes (ECCs) based on hard-decision channel outputs, which is especially suited for storages using NAND flash memories. Targeting energy-efficient NAND flash memory applications, this paper presents an energy-optimized decoder architecture which includes an iterative decoder for a SBC-BCH code as a main decoder and a low-complexity auxiliary decoder for a block-wise single parity-check (BSPC) code. The auxiliary decoder is opportunistically in action to break the dominant error bound associated with the SBC-BCH code, which allows one to lower the uncorrectable bit-error-rate (UBER) to 10−15 in an energy efficient way. This work presents several design-level optimizations for further enhancing the energy-efficiency of the iterative SBC-BCH decoder. More precisely, the new initialization scheme is proposed for ensuring the energy-efficient seamless decoding scenario. The syndrome tracking is applied to eliminate the previous syndrome calculation and the reordered Chien search further enhances the energy-efficiency as well as the decoding throughput. Targeting a 0.9-rate 4KB SBC-BCH code for commercialized storages using NAND flash memories, a prototype decoder consisting of both the iterative main and auxiliary decoders is designed in a 65-nm CMOS process. By applying the proposed optimizations, the prototype decoder achieves an energy-efficiency of 3.43 pJ/b while providing a decoding throughput of 13.2 Gb/s, which is superior to the previous state-of-the-art decoders for mobile storages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, we present a family of architectures for polar decoders using a reduced-complexity successive-cancellation decoding algorithm that employs unrolling to achieve extremely high throughput values while retaining moderate implementation complexity. The resulting fully-unrolled, deeply-pipelined architecture is capable of achieving a coded throughput in excess of 1 Tbps on a 65 nm ASIC at 500 MHz—three orders of magnitude greater than current state-of-the-art polar decoders. However, unrolled decoders are built for a specific, fixed code. Therefore we also present a new method to enable the use of multiple code lengths and rates in a fully-unrolled polar decoder architecture. This method leads to a length- and rate-flexible decoder while retaining the very high speed typical to unrolled decoders. The resulting decoders can decode a master polar code of a given rate and length, and several shorter codes of different rates and lengths. We present results for two versions of a multi-mode decoder supporting eight and ten different polar codes, respectively. Both are capable of a peak throughput of 25.6 Gbps. For each decoder, the energy efficiency for the longest supported polar code is shown to be of 14.8 pJ/bit at 250 MHz and of 8.8 pJ/bit at 500 MHz. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]