Apparatus and method for communicating data over a communication channel

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-10601449-B2
Application number	US-201916575236-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	Sep 18, 2019
Priority date	Feb 15, 2013
Publication date	Mar 24, 2020
Grant date	Mar 24, 2020

Abstract

For some applications such as high-speed communication over short-reach links, the complexity and associated high latency provided by existing modulators may be unsuitable. According to an aspect, the present disclosure provides a modulator that can reduce latency for applications such as 40G/100G communication over copper cables or SMF. The modulator has a symbol mapper for mapping a bit stream into symbols, and a multi-level encoder including an inner encoder and an outer encoder for encoding only a portion of the bit stream. In some implementations, the multi-level encoder is configured such that an information block size of the inner encoder is small and matches a field size of the outer encoder. Therefore, components that would be used to accommodate larger block sizes can be omitted. The effect is that complexity and latency can be reduced. According to another aspect, the present disclosure provides a demodulator that is complementary to the modulator.

First claim

The invention claimed is:

1. A modulator comprising:
a symbol mapper for mapping a bit stream into symbols; and
a multi-level encoder comprising an inner encoder and an outer encoder for encoding only a portion of the bit stream such that an information block size of the inner encoder is a multiple of a field size of the outer encoder;
wherein a portion of the bit stream comprises a least significant bit (LSB) sequence and a non-LSB sequence having p-times as many bits, p being an average number of bits per LSB; and
the symbol mapper being configured for mapping the bit stream into the symbols from a constellation of 2 N symbols, where N is a number of bits and an integer variable from symbol to symbol and selected by a bit loading according to a criterion.

2. The modulator of claim 1 , wherein the criterion comprises a modulation.

3. The modulator of claim 2 , wherein the modulation comprises frequency division multiplexing.

4. The modulator of claim 3 , wherein the modulation comprises Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) modulation.

5. The modulator of claim 4 , wherein:
the symbol comprises a number of M sub-channels of Pulse Amplitude Modulated PAM-N sub symbols; and
a number of bits N i , i in [1,M] is chosen by the bit loading constrained to find the N i resulting in a target value of p.

6. The modulator of claim 5 , wherein N i is a function of rates of codes applied to the LSB and non-LSB sequences.

7. The modulator of claim 1 , wherein different symbols are communicated over different frequency bands.

8. The modulator of claim 7 , wherein the criterion comprises a signal-to-noise ratio of a frequency band.

9. The modulator of claim 1 , wherein the symbol mapper performs the mapping without a non-LSB sequence of the bit stream being encoded.

10. The modulator of claim 1 , further comprising:
a second encoder for encoding the non-LSB sequence of the bit stream.

11. The modulator of claim 10 , wherein the second encoder is an RS (Reed-Solomon) encoder.

12. The modulator of claim 1 , wherein:
the inner encoder is a block encoder; and
the outer encoder is an RS (Reed-Solomon) encoder.

13. The modulator of claim 1 , wherein:
the inner encoder is a Hamming or Extended Hamming encoder; and
the outer encoder is an RS (Reed-Solomon) encoder.

14. The modulator of claim 1 , wherein:
the inner encoder is a single-parity-check encoder; and
the outer encoder is an RS (Reed-Solomon) encoder.

15. The modulator of claim 1 , wherein:
the outer encoder is a Bose Ray-Chaudhuri Hocquenghem (BCH) encoder.

16. A method for modulating a bit stream into symbols, comprising:
encoding only a portion of a bit stream comprising an LSB (Least Significant Bit) sequence and a non-LSB sequence by a multi-level encoder comprising an inner encoder and an outer encoder, such that an information block size of the inner encoder is a multiple of a field size of the outer encoder, the non-LSB sequence having p-times as many bits as the LSB sequence, where p being an average number of bits per LSB; and
mapping the bit stream into the symbols from a constellation of 2 N symbols, where N is a number of bits and an integer variable from symbol to symbol and selected by a bit loading according to a modulation.

17. The method of claim 16 , wherein the modulation comprises frequency division multiplexing.

18. The method of claim 17 , wherein different symbols are communicated over different frequency bands.

19. The method of claim 18 , wherein the bit loading considers a signal-to-noise ratio of a frequency band.

20. The method of claim 16 , wherein:
the symbol comprises a number of M subchannels of Pulse Amplitude Modulated PAM-N sub symbols;
a number of bits N i , i in [1,M] is chosen by the bit loading constrained to find the N i resulting in a target value of p; and
N i is a function of rates of codes applied to the LSB and non-LSB sequences.

Assignees

• Inphi Corp

Inventors

• Smith Benjamin
• Farhoodfar Arash
• Crozier Stewart
• Kschischang Frank R
• Hunt Andrew

Classifications

• H04L1/006 Primary

  Trellis-coded modulation · CPC title

• H04L1/0065

  Serial concatenated codes · CPC title

• H04L25/4917

  using multilevel codes · CPC title

• H04L1/0063

  Single parity check · CPC title

• H03M13/1515

  Reed-Solomon codes · CPC title