Soft decision decoding of Davydov-Tombak codes using a parity check tree

Abstract

Davydov and Tombak have designed an excellent single error correction-double error detection (SEC-DED) code that appears to be more capable of detecting triple and quadruple errors than the conventional Hamming SEC-DED codes. These codes have been applied to memory subsystems and digital storage devices in order to achieve efficient and reliable data processing and storage. A new approach to soft decision decoding of Davydov-Tombak codes using a parity check tree associated with the Tanner graph is presented. For the AWGN channel, gains in excess of 1.6dB at reasonable bit error rates with respect to conventional hard decision decoding are demonstrated for the (40, 33), (37, 30), (35, 28) and (72, 64) Davydov-Tombak codes. �2010 IEEE.