Design and implementation of a pipelined decoder for generalized concatenated codes format

This article proposes a pipelined decoder architecture for generalized concatenated codes (GCC). These codes are constructed from inner binary Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) and outer Reed-Solomon codes. The decoding of the component codes is based on hard decision syndrome decoding algorithms. The concatenated code consists of several small BCH codes. This enables a hardware architecture where the decoding of the component codes is pipelined. A hardware implementation of a GCC decoder is presented and the cell area, cycle counts as well as the timing constraints are investigated. The results are compared to a decoder for long BCH codes with similar error correction performance. In comparison, the pipelined GCC decoder achieves a higher throughput and has lower area consumption.