Reduced-complexity extended Min-sum check node processing for non-binary LDPC decoding

Non-binary low-density parity-check (NB-LDPC) codes can achieve higher coding gain than binary LDPC codes when the code length is moderate at the cost of higher complexity. One major step of NB-LDPC decoding is check node processing. Previously, iterative forward-backward approaches are employed to implement this step. However, the storage of the intermediate results of the forward and backward computations requires large memory. In this paper, a novel check node processing scheme and corresponding VLSI architectures are proposed for the extended Min-sum NB-LDPC decoding. The proposed scheme only stores a limited number of sorted variable-to-check messages. Then the check-to-variable messages for different variable node are generated independently. For a (837, 726) NB-LDPC code over GF(2⁵), the proposed architecture only requires 64% of the area of the previous design with the same throughput and error-correcting performance.