FPGA design of high throughput LDPC decoder based on imprecise Offset Min-Sum decoding

This paper first proposes two new LDPC decoding algorithms that may be seen as imprecise versions of the Offset Min-Sum (OMS) decoding: the Partially OMS, which performs only partially the offset correction, and the Imprecise Partially OMS, which introduces a further level of impreciseness in the check-node processing unit. We show that they allow significant reduction in the memory (25% with respect to the baseline) and interconnect, and we further propose a cost-efficient check-node unit architecture, yielding a cost reduction of 56% with respect to the baseline. We further implement FPGA-based layered decoder architectures using the proposed algorithms as decoding kernels, for a (3, 6)-regular Quasi-Cyclic LDPC code of length 1296 bits, and evaluate them in terms of cost, throughput and decoding performance. Implementation results on Xilinx Virtex 6 FPGA device show that they can achieve a throughput between 1.95 and 2.41 Gbps for 20 decoding iterations (48% to 83% increase with respect to OMS), while providing decoding performance close to the OMS decoder, despite the impreciseness introduced in the processing units.