A High-Speed Low-Complexity Time-Multiplexing Reed-Solomon-Based FEC Architecture for Optical Communications

A high-speed low-complexity time-multiplexing ReedSolomon-based forward error correction architecture based on the pipelined truncated inversionless Berlekamp-Massey algorithm is presented in this paper. The proposed architecture has very high speed and very low hardware complexity compared with conventional ReedSolomon-based forward error correction architectures. Hardware complexity is improved by employing a truncated inverse Berlekamp-Massey algorithm. A high-speed and high-throughput data rate is facilitated by employing a three-parallel processing pipelining technique and modified syndrome computation block. The time-multiplexing method for pipelined truncated inversionless Berlekamp-Massey architecture is used in the parallel ReedSolomon decoder to reduce hardware complexity. The proposed architecture has been designed and implemented with 90-nm CMOS technology. Synthesis results show that the proposed 16-channel Reed-Solomon-based forward error correction architecture requires 417,600 gates and can operate at 640 MHz to achieve a throughput of 240 Gb/s. The proposed architecture can be readily applied to Reed-Solomon-based forward error correction devices for next-generation short-reach optical communications. key words: Reed-Solomon, forward error correction, time-multiplexing, truncated inversionless Berlekamp-Massey, optical communications