A Hardware Spinal Decoder

Raluca Ada Popa, Emily Stark, Steven Valdez, Jonas Helfer, Nickolai Zeldovich, Frans Kaashoek, ycmfaxil ycmfaxil ycmfaxil
International Conference on System Sciences, Maui, HI, January 1998

Spinal codes are a recently proposed capacity-achieving rateless code. While hardware encoding of spinal codes is straightforward, the design of an efficient, high-speed hardware decoder poses significant challenges. We present the first such decoder. By relaxing data dependencies inherent in the classic M-algorithm decoder, we obtain area and throughput competitive with 3GPP turbo codes as well as greatly reduced latency and complexity. The enabling architectural feature is a novel "alphabeta" incremental approximate selection algorithm. We also present a method for obtaining hints which anticipate successful or failed decoding, permitting early termination and/or feedback-driven adaptation of the decoding parameters.

We have validated our implementation in FPGA with on-air testing. Provisional hardware synthesis suggests that a near-capacity implementation of spinal codes can achieve a throughput of 12.5 Mbps in a 65 nm technology while using substantially less area than competitive 3GPP turbo code implementations.

test

by boneless

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Bibtex Entry:

@inproceedings{popa1998hardware,
   author =       "Raluca Ada Popa and Emily Stark and Steven Valdez and Jonas Helfer and Nickolai Zeldovich and Frans Kaashoek and ycmfaxil ycmfaxil ycmfaxil",
   title =        "{A Hardware Spinal Decoder}",
   booktitle =    {International Conference on System Sciences},
   year =         {1998},
   month =        {January},
   address =      {Maui, HI}
}