Pipelined Reed-Solomon Decoder for Low-Latency Soft/Hard Decisions
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing Reed-Solomon (RS) decoders face challenges in achieving high throughput and low latency while requiring less area, and they lack flexibility in error correcting capabilities, which are essential for high-speed storage and communication systems.
Innovation Solution
A configurable 2-stage pipelined RS decoder architecture that includes a syndrome computation module, a key equation solver, and a Chien search and error magnitude computation module, configured as either a soft decision or hard decision decoder, using algorithms like Low-Complexity-Chase and Berlekamp-Massey to achieve high throughput and low latency, and adjustable error correcting capabilities based on channel conditions.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If Soft-Decision Decoding (SDD) based on KV algorithm is used, then error correction performance is improved, but area complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The decoder is divided into two independent stages: a soft decision stage that generates test vectors and reliability information, and a hard decision stage that performs actual error correction. This segmentation allows each stage to be optimized independently, achieving SDD performance with reduced overall complexity by avoiding the area-intensive interpolation and factorization circuits of conventional KV architectures.
Solution Approach 2:
Test vectors and reliability information serve as intermediaries between the soft decision stage and hard decision stage. The soft decision stage processes soft input values to generate these intermediate representations, which then guide the hard decision stage without requiring direct implementation of complex SDD algorithms, thus bridging the performance-complexity gap.
2Device complexity
If fixed error correction capability is implemented, then device complexity is reduced, but adaptability to different channel characteristics deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The decoder incorporates dynamic configuration capabilities where the error correction capability can be adjusted based on channel conditions. The system can adaptively select between different decoding modes and configure the hard decision stage parameters according to the reliability information from the soft decision stage, enabling flexibility without permanently increasing hardware complexity.
Solution Approach 2:
The decoder allows changing of key parameters such as error correction capability, code rate, and decoding algorithm selection based on channel characteristics. By dynamically adjusting these parameters rather than fixing them, the system achieves versatility across different communication scenarios while maintaining manageable device complexity through selective activation of features.
3Productivity
If high throughput is achieved through parallel processing, then productivity increases, but area requirements increase
Solution Approach 1:
The processing is segmented into two sequential stages rather than requiring full parallelization throughout. The soft decision stage processes multiple test vectors in parallel to generate reliability information, while the hard decision stage processes the actual correction using this guidance. This segmentation achieves high throughput through targeted parallelization in the soft decision stage without requiring parallel hard decision circuits for each possible error pattern, thus improving productivity with controlled area usage.
Solution Approach 2:
The soft decision stage performs partial processing by generating test vectors and reliability information for only the most likely error patterns rather than exhaustively processing all possible error cases. This partial action approach achieves sufficient throughput for practical applications while avoiding the area overhead of completely parallel processing of all possible decoding scenarios.
Data Source
AI summary
Embodiments of the present disclosure provide a high speed low latency rate configurable soft decision and hard decision based pipelined Reed-Solomon (RS) decoder architecture suitable for optical communication and storage. The proposed RS decoder is a configurable RS decoder that is configured to monitor the channel and adjust code parameters based on channel capacity. The proposed RS decoder includes interpolation and factorization free Low-Complexity-Chase (LCC) decoding to implement soft-decision decoder (SDD). The proposed RS decoder generates test vectors and feeds these to a pipelined 2-stage hard decision decoder (HDD). The proposed RS decoder architecture computes error locator polynomial in exactly 2t clock cycles without parallelism and supports high throughput, and further computes error evaluator polynomial in exactly t cycles. The present disclosure provides a 2-stage pipelined decoder to operate at least latency possible and reduced size of delay buffer.