Approaching Shannon´s capacity limit by 0.27 dB using Hamming codes in a `turbo´-decoding scheme

The Shannon capacity limit can be reached by less than 0.27 dB at a BER of 10^-5 by applying long but simple Hamming codes as component codes to an iterative `turbo´-decoding scheme. In general, the complexity of soft-in/soft-out decoding of binary block codes is rather high. However, the application of a neurocomputer in combination with a parallelization of the decoding rule facilitates an implementation of the decoding algorithm in the logarithmic domain which requires only matrix additions and multiplications