High Cooling Gain, high rate turbo product codes (TPCs) for Robust Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS) Systems

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project proposes to study the feasibility of producing, in hardware, a class of forward error-correcting codes which are vastly superior to any currently available. These Turbo Product Codes (TPCs) are ideally suited to communications systems where large coding gain is required, but only a limited overhead is acceptable. The best TPC evaluated to date offers a code rate of 4/5 and a coding gain of 6.8 dB at a Bit Error Rate of 10-6, which is less than 1.5 dB from the Shannon limit. To achieve this exceptional performance we have applied three innovative decoding algorithms that exhibit an extreme reduction in complexity over existing techniques. The result is a simple, nearoptimal decoder that enables the construction of a high-speed "turbo-like" codec on a chip.