IEEE 802.11n/ac/ax (WiFi) LDPC Decoder and Encoder

The WiFi family of standards (IEEE 802.11) is used for Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). Its first version from 1997 has been extended by many amendments such as IEEE 802.11n-2009. This amendment was developed in particular for high throughputs of 600 Mbit/s on the air interface. The amendment is now part of IEEE 802.11-2012. The standard uses convolutional codes for forward error correction as minimum requirement. LDPC codes are optional within the standard but because of their superiority over convolutional codes they are widely used today. The LDPC codes defined in IEEE 802.11n-2009 / IEEE 802.11-2012 are also used in the current draft of IEEE 802.11ac. This draft intends to increase the data rates of the WiFi standard to up to 6.93 Gbit/s.

PRODUCT BRIEF

FLEXIBILITY

LATENCY

THROUGHPUT

ERROR CORRECTION

Applications

Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN)
Ultra-wideband (UWB)
Microwave Links
Optical Links
Further High-throughput Applications

Features the Core Supports

Compliant with IEEE 802.11n-2009 and IEEE 802.11-2012
Compliant with IEEE P802.11ac (draft).
Support for all LDPC code rates (1/2, 2/3, 3/4, 5/6)
Support for all LDPC block lengths (648, 1296, and 1944 bits)

Your Benefits

Gains up to 3 dB compared to Viterbi decoders
Low-power and low-complexity design.
Layered LDPC decoder architecture, for faster convergence behavior
Block-to-block on-the-fly configuration.
Early stopping criterion for iterative LDPC decoder, saving a considerable amount of energy
Configurable amount of LDPC decoding iterations for trading-off throughput and error correction performance

Collection of statistic information (number of modified information bits, number of iterations, decoding successful)
Available for ASIC and FPGAs (Xilinx, Intel)
Deliverable includes VHDL source code or synthesized netlist, VHDL testbench, and Matlab, C or C++ bit-accurate simulation model