Simplified Variable Node Unit Architecture for Nonbinary LDPC Decoder

Nonbinary low-density-parity-check (NB-LDPC) code outperforms their binary counterpart in terms of error-correcting performance and error-floor property when the code length is moderate. However, the drawback of NB-LDPC decoders is high complexity and the complexity increases considerably when increasing the Galois-field order. In this paper, a simplified basic-set trellis min-max (sBS-TMM) algorithm that is especially efficient for high-order Galois Fields, is proposed for the variable node processing to reduce the complexity of the variable node unit (VNU) as well as the whole decoder. The decoder architecture corresponding to the proposed algorithm is designed for the (837, 726) NB-LDPC code over GF(32). The implementation results using 90-nm CMOS technology show that the proposed decoder architecture reduces the gate count by 21.35% and 9.4% with almost similar error-correcting performance, compared to the up-to-date works. © 2019 IEEE.