On the higher efficiency of parallel Reed-Solomon turbo-decoding

In this paper, we demonstrate the higher hardware efficiency of Reed-Solomon (RS) parallel turbo decoding compared with BCH parallel turbo decoding. Based on an innovative architecture, this is the first implementation of fully parallel RS turbo decoder. A performance analysis is performed showing that RS block turbo codes (RS-BTC) have decoding performance equivalent to Bose Ray-Chaudhuri Hocquenghem-block turbo codes (BCH-BTC). A ratio between the decoder throughput and the decoder area is used to show the higher efficiency of the RS full parallel turbo decoder. Finally an implementation of a (31,29)² RS block turbo decoder on a high performance board including 6 Xilinx Virtex5 FPGAs is detailed. The resulting turbo decoder has an information throughput above 6 Gb/s while the working frequency is only 45 MHz. It shows that RS BTC are an attractive solution for low cost Gb/s fiber optical communications.