Eliminating the fanout bottleneck in parallel long BCH encoders

Long BCH codes can achieve about 0.6 dB additional coding gain over Reed-Solomon codes with a similar code rate in long-haul optical communication systems. BCH encoders are conventionally implemented by a linear feedback shift register architecture. Encoders of long BCH codes may suffer from the effect of large fanout, which may reduce the achievable clock speed. The data rate requirement of optical applications require parallel implementations of the BCH encoders. In this paper, a novel scheme based on look-ahead computation and retiming is proposed to eliminate the effect of large fanout in parallel long BCH encoders. For a (2047, 1926) code, compared to the original parallel BCH encoder architecture, the modified architecture can achieve a speedup of 132%.