A configurable FPGA FEC unit for Tb/s optical communication

Decoding of FEC (forward error correction) for optical communication beyond 1 Tb/s is investigated. A configurable single FPGA solution is presented having configurations supporting bit-rates in the range from 40 Gb/s to 1.6 Tb/s. The design allows for trade-offs of bit-rate, footprint, and latency within the resources of the FPGA. A proof-of-concept lab experiment at 40 Gb/s was conducted and pre-FEC — post-FEC performance validated with simulated results.