A 33.06-Gb/s Reconfigurable Galois Field oFEC Decoder for Optical Intersatellite Communication

Abstract

We introduce a high-throughput reconfigurable forward error correction (FEC) decoder capable of decoding BCH, RS, and open FEC (oFEC) codes. With a reconfigurable BCH inner code, the proposed decoder in the oFEC mode provides a wide range of coding gain and throughput to enable efficient and reliable intersatellite optical communication. It features unprecedented reconfigurability for BCH/RS codes in terms of Galois field (GF) size, code length, code rate, and parallel factor, providing tradeoffs between error correction performance, energy, and throughput. Fabricated in 12-nm CMOS technology, the decoder achieves a throughput of 33.06 Gb/s, energy efficiency of 40.35 pJ/b, and a net coding gain of 7.27 dB at $10^{\text {-6}}$ BER with an oFEC code using inner BCH(256, 223).