Methods and apparatus for power efficient design of forward error correction for optical communication systems

Abstract

Consistent with a further aspect of the present disclosure, previously encoded data is stored in a memory, and an encoder accesses both input data and previously encoded data to generate new encoded data or a new codeword. Each codeword is stored in a row of the memory, and with each newly generated codeword, each previously stored code word is shifted to an adjacent row of the memory. In one example, the memory is delineated as a plurality of blocks including rows and columns of bits. When generating a new code word, randomly selected columns of bits in the memory are read from randomly selected blocks of the memory and supplied to the encoder. In this manner the number of times the memory is access is reduced and power consumption is reduced.