Quasi-Cyclic LDPC Codes for the Magnetic Recording Channel: Code Design and VLSI Implementation

By implementing a field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based simulator, we investigate the performance of randomly constructed high-rate quasi-cyclic (QC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes for the magnetic recording channel at very low block sector error rates. On the basis of extensive simulations, we conjecture guidelines for designing randomly constructed high-rate regular QC-LDPC codes with low error floor for the magnetic recording channel. Experimental results show that our high-rate regular QC-LDPC codes do not suffer from error floor, at least at block error rates of 10
^-9
, and can realize significant coding gains over Reed-Solomon codes that are used in current practice. Furthermore, we develop a QC-LDPC decoder hardware architecture that is well suited to achieving high decoding throughput. Finally, to evaluate the implementation feasibility of LDPC codes for the magnetic recording channel, using 0.13 mum standard cell and memory libraries, we designed a read channel signal processing datapath consisting of a parallel max-log-MAP detector and a QC-LDPC decoder, which can achieve a throughput up to 1.8 Gb/s