Multi-Stage Decoder Circuit for Low-Power Error Correction
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current soft-decision decoders in optical transport networks consume significantly more power than hard-decision decoders, posing a challenge for energy-efficient communication systems, particularly in miniaturized optical communication devices where power consumption must be minimized.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a configuration of multiple decoder modules in series, including low-power and high-performance decoders, where the low-power decoder handles most error corrections and the high-performance decoder addresses remaining errors, with inactive modules in a sleep state to reduce overall power consumption, and utilizing a finite state machine with different decoding algorithms to optimize power and performance.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If soft-decision decoders are used to improve decoding performance, then decoding performance is improved by 1 dB or more, but power consumption increases by an order of magnitude compared to hard-decision decoders
Solution Approach 1:
The decoder is divided into multiple stages: a hard-decision decoder stage followed by one or more soft-decision decoder stages. This segmentation allows the system to first perform low-power hard-decision decoding, and only proceed to higher-power soft-decision decoding when necessary, thereby reducing overall power consumption while maintaining decoding performance.
Solution Approach 2:
Instead of always performing full soft-decision decoding, the system applies soft-decision decoding only partially - specifically, only when the hard-decision decoder fails to achieve the target error rate. This partial action approach significantly reduces power consumption while maintaining the performance benefits of soft-decision decoding when needed.
2Use of energy by moving object
If multiple decoder modules are used in series to reduce power consumption, then power consumption is reduced, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
A controller module acts as an intermediary between the hard-decision decoder and soft-decision decoder stages. This controller receives performance feedback from the hard-decision decoder and automatically determines whether to activate the soft-decision decoder stages, thereby managing the complexity of the multi-stage configuration without requiring complex external control logic.
Solution Approach 2:
The system implements feedback mechanisms where the output of each decoder stage is evaluated to determine whether further decoding is necessary. This feedback-driven approach allows the system to dynamically adjust its operation, activating additional decoder stages only when performance targets are not met, thereby simplifying the effective complexity while maintaining power efficiency.
Data Source
AI summary
A decoder circuit includes first and second decoders. The first decoder is a first type of decoder configured to receive data encoded with an error correction code and decode and eliminate errors from a first subset of codewords of the data. The second decoder is a second type of decoder configured receive the data encoded with the error correction code and decode and eliminate errors from a second subset of codewords of the data, different from the first subset of the codewords, without attempting to decode and eliminate errors from the first subset of the codewords.