Energy Efficient FEC Decoders

Channel coding, or Forward Error Correction (FEC), is a crucial technology component in any digital baseband processing. Decoder IPs for advanced coding schemes like Turbo, LDPC, and Polar codes are major sources of power consumption and silicon area in baseband SOCs and largely contribute to the baseband latency and throughput limitations. Although we observe a continuous increase in throughput and lower latency requirements in emerging communication standards, the available power and energy budget does not increase due to, e.g., thermal design power constraints. If we look on the silicon technology progress, the transistor density still follows Moore’s law, but the power improvement largely slows down, that exacerbates the power density problem. Hence, for use cases with high throughput requirements like B5G, power, power density and energy efficiency become a major bottleneck for the successful application of advanced channel coding from a silicon implementation perspective. In this paper we focus especially on LDPC and Polar codes since they are part of many communication standards. Challenges, power and energy optimizations on the different design levels for decoders targeting throughput towards 1Tb/s and various trade-offs are presented.