Real-time turbo-decoding of product codes on a digital signal processor

A new “block turbo code” algorithm was proposed previously for decoding product codes. A high coding rate with a high coding gain can be obtained with this code. Compared to convolutional turbo codes, the performance is comparable. To suit different applications, it is desirable to easily modify the component codes parameters. For obtaining both flexibility and adaptability, the DSP option was chosen for implementation. Using a product code based on BCH (32, 26, 4) block codes, the coding gain, for a bit error rate of 10^-5, slightly exceeds 6 dB. The bit rate reaches 160 kbit/s on 20 Mips DSP decoders in a cascaded configuration