Design of VLSI implementation-oriented LDPC codes

Abstract

Recently, low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes have attracted much attention because of their excellent error-correcting performance and highly parallelizable decoding scheme. However, the effective VLSI implementation of an LDPC decoder remains a big challenge and is a crucial issue in determining how well we can exploit the benefits of the LDPC codes in real applications. In this paper, following the joint code and decoder design philosophy, we propose a semi-random design scheme to construct the LDPC codes that not only exhibit very good error-correcting performance but also effectively fit to partially parallel VLSI decoder implementations. The corresponding partially parallel decoder has a very regular structure and simple control mechanism. Our computer simulations show that such LDPC codes achieve very good performance comparable to their counterparts constructed in a fully random scheme, which however have little chance of fitting to partially parallel decoder implementations.