Cost-effective scalable QC-LDPC decoder designs for non-volatile memory systems

This paper presents a cost-effective scalable quasi-cyclic LDPC (QC-LDPC) decoder architecture for non-volatile memory systems (NVMS). A re-arranged architecture is proposed to eliminate the first-in-first-out (FIFO) memory in conventional decoders, where the FIFO size is linearly proportional to the codeword size. The area reduction is 18.5% compared to the conventional decoder architecture. The scalable datapaths of the proposed decoder reduce the re-design cost and enable the flexibility of using QC-LDPC codes for NVMS. A prototyping decoder with maximum codeword size of 9280 bits is implemented in TSMC 90nm CMOS technology, and the core area is only 2.52mm² at 138.8MHz.