6.4Gb/s multi-threaded BCH encoder and decoder for multi-channel SSD controllers

Solid-state drives (SSDs), built with many flash memory channels, is usually connected to the host through an advanced high-speed serial interface such as SATA III associated with a transfer rate of 6Gb/s [1–2]. However, the performance of SSD is in general determined by the throughput of the ECC blocks necessary to overcome the high error-rate [3]. The binary BCH code is widely used for the SSD due to its powerful error-correction capability. As it is hard to achieve high-throughput strong BCH decoders [4–5], multiple BCH decoders are typically on a high-performance SSD controller, leading to a significant increase of hardware complexity. This paper presents an efficient BCH encoder/decoder architecture achieving a decoding throughput of 6Gb/s. The overall architecture shown in Fig. 25.3.1 includes a single BCH decoder and a multi-threaded BCH encoder. The single BCH encoder is responsible for all the channels and services a channel at a time in a round-robin manner.