Implementing LDPC decoding on network-on-chip

Low-density parity check codes are a form of error correcting codes used in various wireless communication applications and in disk drives. While LDPC codes are desirable due to their ability to achieve near Shannon-limit communication channel capacity, the computational complexity of the decoder is a major concern. LDPC decoding consists of a series of iterative computations derived from a message-passing bipartite graph. In order to efficiently support the communication intensive nature of this application, we present a LDPC decoder architecture based on a network-on-chip communication fabric that provides a 1.2 Gbps decoded throughput rate for a 3/4 code rate, 1024-bit block LDPC code. The proposed architecture can be reconfigured to support other LDPC codes of different block sizes and code rates. We also propose two novel power-aware optimizations that reduce the power consumption by up to 30%.