Single-chip 10.7 gb/s FEC codec LSI using time-multiplexed RS decoder

This paper describes a 10.7 Gb/s throughput FEC (Forward Error Correction) codec LSI for optical transmission systems. In order to reduce the power consumption and logic size, the FEC codec uses a time-multiplexed Reed-Solomon (RS) decoder, which is shared among 4 RS codewords and processes 5 parallel digits. The time-multiplexed RS decoder requires only 58% of the gates and 75% of the power consumption of the conventional decoder. As a result, the codec achieves a low power consumption of only 3.31 W and a low gate count of only 1.1 Mgates using 0.18 /spl mu/m CMOS technology.