Single-chip FEC codec using a concatenated BCH code for 10 Gb/s long-haul optical transmission systems

This paper describes a 10 Gb/s throughput FEC (forward error correction) codec for long-haul optical transmission systems. The FEC codec uses concatenated BCH(2040, 1930) and BCH(3860, 3824), which provides an excellent 7.98 dB net coding gain at 1E/sup -12/ corrected bit error rate with 6.69% redundancy by applying three times iterative decoding. Furthermore, by applying a time-multiplexed decoder and skipping Chien search process for uncorrectable BCH(3860, 3824) codewords, the FEC codec achieves a low power consumption of 3.15 W and a low gate count of 2.40 Mgates using 0.15 /spl mu/m CMOS technology.