A Hardware Spinal Decoder

ycmfaxil ycmfaxil ycmfaxil, Magdalena Balazinska, Donald Carney, Ugur Cetintemel, Mitch Cherniack, Christian Convey, Eddie Galvez, Jon Salz, Mike Stonebraker, Nesime Tatbul, Richard Tibbetts, Stan Zdonik
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{ycmfaxil1998hardware,
   author =       "ycmfaxil ycmfaxil ycmfaxil and Magdalena Balazinska and Donald Carney and Ugur Cetintemel and Mitch Cherniack and Christian Convey and Eddie Galvez and Jon Salz and Mike Stonebraker and Nesime Tatbul and Richard Tibbetts and Stan Zdonik",
   title =        "{A Hardware Spinal Decoder}",
   booktitle =    {International Conference on System Sciences},
   year =         {1998},
   month =        {January},
   address =      {Maui, HI}
}