A 100 Gbps LDPC Decoder for the IEEE 802.11ay Standard

IEEE 802.11ay is the amendment to the 802.11 standard that enables Wi-Fi devices to achieve 100 Gbps using the unlicensed mm-Wave (60 GHz) band at comparable ranges to today’s commercial 60 GHz devices based on the 802.11ad standard. In this paper, we propose a full row-based layered LDPC decoder supporting all the coding rates for 802.11ay. Taking the property of the parity check matrix of 802.11ay, combining multiple layers into single layer improves the Hardware utilization hence increases the throughput. The throughput is further increased by interleaving multiple frames to improve the utilization of each pipeline stage. The decoder is synthesized at both 28 nm and 16 nm CMOS technology and power estimated with stimuli at 7db and 3.5db. The 28 nm implementation running at 600 MHz and achieves a throughput of 67 Gbps for coding rate 13/16 at 4 iterations with area efficiency of 160 Gbps/sqmm and consumes an average power consumption of 408 mW and 141 mW, yielding energy efficiency of 6.05 pJ/bit and 2.1 pJ/bit at 3.5db and 7db. The 16 nm implementation running at 1 GHz and achieves a throughput of 112 Gbps at 4 iterations with area efficiency of 589 Gbps/sqmm and consumes an average power of 408mW and 163mW, yielding energy efficiency of 3.64 pJ/bit and 1.45 pJ/bit at 3.5db and 7db.