Decoder architecture for generalised concatenated codes
This paper proposes a pipelined decoder architecture for generalised concatenated (GC) codes. These codes are constructed from inner binary Bose–Chaudhuri–Hocquenghem (BCH) and outer Reed–Solomon codes. The decoding of the component codes is based on hard decision syndrome decoding algorithms. The concatenated code consists of several small BCH codes. This enables a hardware architecture where the decoding of the component codes is pipelined. A hardware implementation of a GC decoder is presented and the cell area, cycle counts as well as the timing constraints are investigated. The results are compared to a decoder for long BCH codes with similar error correction performance. In comparison, the pipelined GC decoder achieves a higher throughput and has lower area consumption.