A 26.9 K 314.5 Mb/s Soft (32400,32208) BCH Decoder Chip for DVB-S2 System

Abstract

This paper provides a soft Bose-Chaudhuri-Hochquenghem (BCH) decoder chip with soft information from the LDPC decoder for the DVB-S2 system. In contrast with the hard BCH decoder, the proposed soft BCH decoder that deals with least reliable bits can provide much lower complexity with similar error-correcting performance. Moreover, the error locator evaluator is proposed to evaluate error locations without the Chien search for higher throughput, and the Bjorck-Pereyra error magnitude solver (BP-EMS) is presented to improve decoding efficiency and hardware complexity. The chip measurement results reveal that our proposed soft (32400, 32208) BCH decoder for DVB-S2 system can achieve 314.5 Mb/s with a gate-count of 26.9 K in standard 90 nm 1P9M CMOS technology. Extended for fully supporting 21 modes in the DVB-S2 system, our approach can achieve 300 MHz operation frequency with a gate-count of 32.4 K.