Energy Limits of Message-Passing Error Control Decoders
Christian B. Schlegel, Winstead, Christopher · Repository for Publications and Research Data (ETH Zurich) · 2014
Modern message-passing error control decoders are studied in regards to the processing energy required to extract digital information from a noisy received signal.It is shown that fundamental charge-based computational models, together with limits of error-free message passing along the processors' communications network, imply a lower limit to the energy efficiency achievable for such decoders in modern and future VLSI implementation technologies.The limiting energy of node processing is estimated for belief propagation decoding of LDPC codes, using estimates of nodes' internal processing activity.The limiting energy of message passing is estimated by using an energy-annotated density evolution procedure.For the class of decoders studied, the minimum energy is found to be on the order of 0.4 fJ per bit for node processing, and 9.86 aJ per bit for message passing.