A dynamically reconfigurable ECC decoder architecture

Due to their impressive error correction performances, Error Correcting Codes (ECC) are now widely used in communication systems. In order to achieve high throughput requirements ECC decoders are based on parallel architectures, which results in a major issue: memory access conflicts. In this paper, we introduce a new class of ECC decoder architectures that dynamically reconfigures by executing on-chip a memory mapping approach. For that purpose, a dedicated algorithm taking into account network constraint is presented. A smart architecture based on a butterfly network and a reconfiguration unit is also proposed. Experimental results show that real-time reconfiguration at reasonable hardware cost is possible.