A High-Efficiency Segmented Reconfigurable Cyclic Shifter for 5G QC-LDPC Decoder

A reconfigurable cyclic shifter is a key element of a QC-LDPC decoder, which is crucial for 5G communication systems. If a traditional reconfigurable cyclic shifter can only shift one input of variable size at a time, a traditional QC-LDPC decoder can only decode one codeword at a time as well. Part of the circuitry of the traditional QC-LDPC decoder inevitably stays in idle during the decoding process if the length (or the lifting parameter) of a codeword is not the maximum, resulting in low hardware efficiency. A segmented reconfigurable cyclic shifter is proposed in this paper, which can be divided into multiple segments of different sizes. Each segment can perform a cyclic shift of an input of different sizes and of different shift values independently. Furthermore, a methodology is proposed to upgrade any state-of-the-art QC-LDPC decoder to a segmented QC-LDPC decoder, by using the proposed segmented shifter. The upgraded segmented QC-LDPC decoder is able to parallelly decode multiple codewords (or inputs) of different lengths at a time. A test chip of the proposed segmented QC-LDPC decoder with the proposed segmented reconfigurable cyclic shifter has been fabricated in a 0.18-μm CMOS technology to demonstrate the feature of parallelly decoding multiple codewords. The performance analysis shows that when the number of small codewords is increased from 0 to 100000 per second, the throughput of the traditional QC-LDPC decoder drops from 844.80 Mbps to 4.40 Mbps, while the QC-LDPC decoder with the proposed segmented shifter only slightly drops to 814.01 Mbps. By applying the segmented QC-LDPC decoder in 5G base stations, the base stations are enabled to support more low-traffic users.