ECC wins NASA SBIR Phase I contract for C-TPC development

Cleveland, OH - November 1998 - Efficient Channel Coding (ECC), Inc. has been awarded a SBIR phase I contract to evaluate the performance and feasibility of implementing a class of powerful and innovative combined forward error correction (FEC) technique called Concatenated Turbo Product Codes (C-TPCs). C-TPCs are a significant enhancement to ECC’s previously developed TPC technology. C-TPCs allow for performance closer to the Shannon limit at lower code rates and can also achieve excellent coding gains with relatively small block sizes. C-TPCs are unique as compared to other concatenated codes in that they are built from linear block codes rich in algebraic structure resulting in simplified interleaver designs. The inherent flexible nature of C-TPCs offer a variety of code rates and coding gains that emphasize low complexity to enable low-cost and high-speed implementations. Moreover, the flexibility when combined with the iterative decoding make C-TPCs useful in links with variable SNRs caused by effects such as rain fade, multipath interference, or other time varying links. The block oriented nature of C-TPCs also makes them ideally suited for next generation, packet based communications systems. Constituent TPC ASIC and software devices currently under development by ECC will greatly accelerate the implementation of C-TPC systems.