Hybrid Ordered Statistics Decoding of Short-Length BCH Codes for URLLC Systems: Theoretical Analysis and Decoder Implementation

The ordered statistics decoding (OSD) algorithm has been gaining popularity for ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) scenarios due to its near-maximum likelihood decoding performance, especially for short linear block codes. However, its substantial computational complexity hinders practical applications. In this paper, we introduce an advanced hybrid OSD algorithm that fully utilizes the hard-decision algebraic decoding results to selectively activate soft-decision OSD operations, significantly mitigating computational complexity. Through a rigorous analysis of error-correction characteristics, we derive a theoretical condition under which the hybrid OSD algorithm guarantees superior error-correction performance over the baseline OSD. To apply the proposed hybrid algorithm to the emerging URLLC systems, we also present a novel decoder architecture that efficiently integrates hard-and soft-decision operations. For (127, 64) BCH codes, the prototype decoder in a 28-nm process achieves an average processing latency of 773 ns at a target block error rate of 10^-5, improving information throughput by 4.2× and energy-efficiency by 35× and offering coding gain compared to previous OSD hardware designs.