Turbo Codes

Alexandre Giulietti

Turbo Codes: Desirable and Designable introduces the basics of turbo codes in their different flavors (more specifically, parallel concatenated convolutional turbo codes and block turbo codes). Through the application of systemic design methodology that considers data transfer and storage as top priority candidates for optimization, the authors show how turbo codes can be implemented and the attractive performance results that can be achieved in throughput, latency and energy consumption. These solutions and results make turbo-codes close competitors to traditional coding scheme such as convolutional codes or algebraic codes. Finally, a real-life prototype of parallel concatenated convolutional (turbo-) codes is presented. A complete turbo codes ASIC data-flow is described together with on-board power, speed and coding gain measurements that demonstrate the effectiveness of the...