A low power layered decoding architecture for LDPC decoder implementation for IEEE 802.11n LDPC codes

Abstract

This paper presents a low power LDPC decoder design based on reducing the amount of memory access. By utilizing the column overlapping of the LDPC parity check matrix, the amount of access for the memory storing the posterior values is minimized. In addition, a thresholding decoding scheme is proposed which reduces the memory access by trading off the error correcting performance. The decoder was implemented in TSMC 0.18μm CMOS process. Experimental results show that for a LDPC decoder targeting for IEEE 802.11n, the power consumption of the memory and the decoder can be reduced by 72% and 24%, respectively.