LP-LDPC:Three-Level Parallel FPGA Architecture for Fast Prototyping of LDPC Decoder Using High-Level Synthesis

Low-Density Parity-heck Codes(LDPC)with excellent error-correction capabilities have been widely used in both data communication and storage fields,to construct reliable cyber-physical systems that are resilient to real-world noises.Fast prototyping field-programmable gate array(FPGA)-based decoder is essential to achieve high decoding performance while accelerating the development process.This paper proposes a three-level parallel architecture,TLP-LDPC,to achieve high throughput by fully exploiting the characteristics of both LDPC and underlying hardware while effectively scaling to large-size FPGA platforms.The three-level parallel architecture contains a low-level decoding unit,a mid-level multi-unit decoding core,and a high-level multi-core decoder.The low-level decoding unit is a basic LDPC computation component that effectively combines the features of the LDPC algorithm and hardware with the specific structure(e.g.,Look-Up-Table,LUT)of the FPGA and eliminates potential data conflicts.The mid-level decoding core integrates the input/output and multiple decoding units in a well-balancing pipelined fashion.The top-level multi-core architecture conveniently makes full use of board-level resources to improve the overall throughput.We develop an LDPC C++code with dedicated pragmas and leverage HLS tools to implement the TLP-LDPC architecture.Experimental results show that TLP-LDPC achieves 9.63 Gbps end-to-end decoding throughput on a Xilinx Alveo U50 platform,3.9x higher than existing HLS-based FPGA implementations.