Electro-Optical Reed-Muller Code Decoders Based on Integrated Optics

Forward error correction (FEC) techniques are widely used in various communication systems, including 4G/5G wireless communication, Internet, optical communication, etc. FEC en/decoders are normally implemented with silicon-based circuits and their power consumption and throughput are usually the crucial concerns. Photonic approaches have demonstrated extraordinary potential for some computation-hungry applications like neural networks. In this work, an on-chip electro-optical circuit is proposed to perform FEC decoding tasks with high integration potential and low power consumption characteristics. Leveraging optical computing-friendly algorithmic transformations and a meticulously crafted optical path design, an electro-optical decoder for Reed-Muller (RM) codes is presented. We show by simulation that our proposed decoders achieve a significant computational benefit in energy consumption compared to the standard Dumer’s recursive decoder without an appreciable performance penalty. This on-chip FEC decoder provides a potential solution for improving future FEC hardware with enhanced performance. It may be suitable for optical communication systems to lower the bit error rate at the front end.