*** 9660149 Thesling This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project proposes to study the feasibility of producing, in hardware, a class of forward error-correcting codes which are vastly superior to any currently available. These Turbo Product Codes (TPCs) are ideally suited to communications systems where large coding gain is required, but only a limited overhead is acceptable. The best TPC evaluated to date offers a code rate of 4/5 and a coding gain of 6.8 dB at a Bit Error Rate of 10-6, which is less than 1.7 dB from the Shannon limit. To achieve this exceptional performance three innovative decoding algorithms that exhibit an extreme reduction in complexity over existing techniques were applied. The result is a simple, near-optimal decoder that enables the construction of a high-speed "turbo-like" codec on a chip. The resulting codec chip is applicable to a large number of digital communications systems. This includes RF links for Wireless Local Area Networks in the license-free industrial, scientific, and medical bands and infrared laser wireless systems for various applications. The codes also have applications in the next-generation satellite communications systems. ***
