A Hardware Spinal Decoder

Paramvir Victor Bahl, Paul Barham, Richard Black, Ranveer Chandra, Moises Goldszmidt, Rebecca Isaacs, Srikanth Kandula, Lun Li, John MacCormick, David Maltz, Richard Mortier, Mike Wawrzoniak, Ming Zhang
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

[PDF (0KB)] [PostScript (0KB)] [Gzipped PostScript (0KB)] [Presentation (0KB)]
1

Bibtex Entry:

@inproceedings{bahl1998hardware,
   author =       "Paramvir Victor Bahl and Paul Barham and Richard Black and Ranveer Chandra and Moises Goldszmidt and Rebecca Isaacs and Srikanth Kandula and Lun Li and John MacCormick and David Maltz and Richard Mortier and Mike Wawrzoniak and Ming Zhang",
   title =        "{A Hardware Spinal Decoder}",
   booktitle =    {International Conference on System Sciences},
   year =         {1998},
   month =        {January},
   address =      {Maui, HI}
}