A parallelized layered QC-LDPC decoder for IEEE 802.11ad

We present a doubly parallelized layered quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check decoder for the emerging IEEE 802.11ad multigigabit wireless standard. The decoding algorithm is equivalent to a non-parallelized layered decoder and, thus, retains its favorable convergence characteristics, which are known to be superior to those of flooding schedule based decoders. The proposed architecture was synthesized using a TSMC 40 nm CMOS technology, resulting in a cell area of 0.18 mm² and a clock frequency of 850 MHz. At this clock frequency, the decoder achieves a coded throughput of 3.12 Gbps, thus meeting the throughput requirements when using both the mandatory BPSK modulation and the optional QPSK modulation.