A memory-based architecture for FPGA implementations of low-density parity-check convolutional decoders

Low-density parity-check convolutional codes complement their popular block-oriented counterparts and may be more suitable in certain communication applications. These include streaming voice and video and packet switching networks. In this paper we introduce these codes and propose a memory-based decoder architecture that is well suited for implementation on field-programmable gate arrays. We present an overview of the architecture and demonstrate its efficiency over register-based architectures. We then discuss a realization of this architecture that can trade performance for throughput and can achieve up to 120 Mb/s of information throughput and a BER as low as 2 × 10^-6 at an Eb/Nq of 3 dB on an Altera Stratix FPGA. For a first-generation implementation this compares favorable with current block-oriented decoder implementations.