Improved High Code-Rate Soft BCH Decoder Architectures With One Extra Error Compensation

Abstract

Compared with traditonal hard Bose-Chaudhuri-Hochquenghem (BCH) decoders, soft BCH decoders provide better error-correcting performance but much higher hardware complexity. In this brief, an improved soft BCH decoding algorithm is presented to achieve both competitive hardware complexity and better error-correcting performance by dealing with least reliable bits and compensating one extra error outside the least reliable set. For BCH (255, 239; 2) and (255, 231; 3) codes, our proposed soft BCH decoders can achieve up to 0.75-dB coding gain with one extra error compensation and 5% less complexity than the traditional hard BCH decoders.