A Highly Flexible LDPC Decoder using Hierarchical Quasi-Cyclic Matrix with Layered Permutation

Hardware implementation of partially-parallel Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) decoders using unstructured random matrices is very complex and requires huge hardware resources. To alleviate the complexity and minimize resource requirements, structured LDPC matrices are used. This paper presents a novel technique for constructing a multi-level Hierarchical Quasi-Cyclic (HQC) structured matrix for LDPC decoder. A unique multi-level structure of the proposed matrix provides flexibility in generating different code lengths and code rates for various applications such as WiMAX, WLAN and DVB-S2. In addition, different combinations of permuted sub-matrices are inserted in layers at different levels of matrix hierarchy to provide virtual randomness in the LDPC matrix. Simulation results show that the HQC matrices generated using the proposed technique have a marginal loss of less than 0.1 dB at a bit error rate (BER) performance 10-5 compared to unstructured random matrices. A hardware model of the proposed matrix structure has been developed and synthesized on Xilinx FPGA to verify the flexibility features, hardware requirements and to analyze the performance of the LDPC decoder.