A 47 Gb/s LDPC decoder with improved low error rate performance

A parallel low-density parity-check (LDPC) decoder is designed for the (2048,1723) Reed-Solomon-based LDPC (RS-LDPC) code suitable for 10GBASE-T Ethernet. A two-step decoding scheme lowers the error floor to a 10−14 BER. The decoder architecture is optimized for area, power, and high throughput. The resulting 5.35 mm2, 65nm CMOS chip achieves a decoding throughput of 47.7 Gb/s. With scaled frequency and voltage, the chip delivers a 6.67 Gb/s throughput while dissipating 144 mW of power.