2022-023 COPYRIGHT: FIELD-PROGRAMMABLE GATE ARRAY (FPGA) CORE FOR PROTOGRAPH-BASED RAPTOR-LIKE (PBRL) LOW-DENSITY PARITY-CHECK (LDPC) ENCODING AND DECODING

SUMMARY:

UCLA researchers in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering have developed a software that serves as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) encoder and decoder for optical communications.

BACKGROUND:

Satellite communications requires wireless communication techniques that are resilient, secure, and able to process high volumes of data with minimal delay. The Space Development Agency has initiated the establishment of the Transport Layer Tranche 1 (TLT1), a constellation of up to 144 satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) aimed at providing warfighting capability and secure telecommunications access. Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes is a type of error correcting code commonly used in transmitting messages over noisy channels, including wireless channels. Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA’s) have been used for developing the encoders and decoders for LDPC codes. The primary advantage of FPGA’s includes the capability of being configured by a customer or a designer after manufacturing, customized to the user’s specific applications. There is the need for commercially available FPGA encoders and decoders specifically for satellite communications.

INNOVATION:

UCLA researchers in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering have developed novel FPGAs encoder and decoder specially for satellite communication. The software meets the requirements under the establishment of the Transport Layer Tranche 1 (TLT1) initiated by the Space Development Agency. The prototype developed on FPGA implementation exhibits the capability of distilling to a device and the progress towards market readiness. Such technology is also applicable to advanced civil wireless communications such as 5G.

POTENTIAL APPLICATIONS:

• Space-to-space (S2S, a.k.a. Optical Intersatellite Links or OISLs), space-to-air (S2A), space-to-maritime (S2M), and space-to-ground (S2G) optical communications
• Advanced civil wireless communications (e.g., 5G)
• Telecommunications

ADVANTAGES:

• Improved performance
• Reduced complexity

DEVELOPMENT TO DATE:

First successful description and demonstration

RELATED PAPERS:

• Chen, T. Y., Divsalar, D., Wang, J., & Wesel, R. D. (2011, December). Protograph-based raptor-like LDPC codes for rate compatibility with short blocklengths. In 2011 IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference-GLOBECOM 2011 (pp. 1-6). IEEE. DOI: 10.1109/GLOCOM.2011.6134051
• Terrill, C., Wang, L., Chen, S., Hulse, C., Kuo, C., Wesel, R., & Divsalar, D. (2021). FPGA Implementations of Layered MinSum LDPC Decoders Using RCQ Message Passing. arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.09480. 
• Wang, L., Wesel, R. D., Stark, M., & Bauch, G. (2020, December). A Reconstruction-Computation-Quantization (RCQ) Approach to Node Operations in LDPC Decoding. In GLOBECOM 2020-2020 IEEE Global Communications Conference (pp. 1-6). IEEE. DOI: 10.1109/GLOBECOM42002.2020.9348139