Fully Parallel Stochastic LDPC Decoders

Stochastic decoding is a new approach to iterative decoding on graphs. This paper presents a hardware architecture for fully parallel stochastic low-density parity-check (LDPC) decoders. To obtain the characteristics of the proposed architecture, we apply this architecture to decode an irregular state-of-the-art (1056,528) LDPC code on a Xilinx Virtex-4 LX200 field-programmable gate-array (FPGA) device. The implemented decoder achieves a clock frequency of 222 MHz and a throughput of about 1.66 Gb/s at E_b/N₀=4.25 dB (a bit error rate of 10^-8). It provides decoding performance within 0.5 and 0.25 dB of the floating-point sum-product algorithm with 32 and 16 iterations, respectively, and similar error-floor behavior. The decoder uses less than 40% of the lookup tables, flip-flops, and IO ports available on the FPGA device. The results provided in this paper validate the potential of stochastic LDPC decoding as a practical and competitive fully parallel decoding approach.