ECC wins NAVY SBIR Phase II contract for TPC development

Cleveland, OH - September 30, 1998 - Efficient Channel Coding (ECC), Inc. has won a phase II contract from the Space and Naval Warfare Systems command. The project will further the development of an codec ASIC that outperforms forward error correction codes used in today's communications systems. The technology is based on ECC’s decoding method that provides low complexity near optimal performance. The family of codes, called Turbo Product Codes (TPCs) are ideally suited to systems where large coding gain is required, but only a limited overhead is acceptable. For example, on TPC evaluated offers a code rate of 4/5 and a coding gain of 7.0 dB at a Bit Error Rate of 10 -6, which is 1.5 dB from the Shannon limit. Due to the inherent flexible nature of TPCs, a variety of other code rates and coding gains are available. Moreover, the flexibility when combined with the iterative decoding make TPCs useful in links with variable SNRs and variable data rates caused by effects such as rain fade or a multipath interference.

A flexible TPC codec chip applicable to a large number of commercial and military digital communications systems. ECC is targeting TPC insertion into the next generation Direct Broadcast Satellite and other future satellite communications systems as well as emerging terrestrial systems. These terrestrial systems include Wireless Local Area Networks, Digital Radio, Digital Television, Local Multipoint Distribution Systems, cable modems, Digital Subscriber Links, and Video Blanking Interval data broadcasting. For military applications, ECC is advocating the use of TPCs in satellite to mobile systems as well to Phase III Global Broadcast Service (GBS) terminals to take advantage of the improved performance (over baselined codes) and the flexible decoding of TPCs.