A Novel FEC Implementation for VSAT Terminals Using High-Level Synthesis

This paper presents a hardware-efficient field-programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation of a layered two-dimensional corrected normalized min-sum (2D-CNMS) decoder for quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (QC-LDPC) codes in very small aperture terminal (VSAT) satellite communication systems. The decoder is described in C++ and synthesized using the Xilinx Vitis high-level synthesis (HLS) 2025 (AMD Xilinx, San Jose, CA, USA) tool, and then packaged and integrated as an intellectual property (IP) core within the Vivado Design Suite 2024 (AMD Xilinx, San Jose, CA, USA), enabling rapid prototyping and portability across FPGA platforms. Unlike conventional normalized min-sum (NMS) and two-dimensional normalized min-sum (2D-NMS) architectures, the proposed 2D-CNMS scheme employs dyadic, multiplier-free normalization combined with two-level magnitude correction, achieving near sum-product performance with reduced complexity and latency. The design is implemented on a Zynq UltraScale+ multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSoC) (AMD Xilinx, San Jose, CA, USA) and supports real-time operation with a throughput of 29–41 Mbps at 100 MHz, while using only 9.6–22.4 k look-up tables (LUTs), 2.1–5.9 k flip-flops (FFs), and no digital signal processing (DSP) slices or block random-access memories (BRAMs). Bit-error-rate (BER) simulations over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel show no error floor down to 10−8. These results demonstrate that the proposed HLS-based 2D-CNMS IP core provides a resource-efficient, high-performance LDPC decoding solution as compared with existing LDPC implementation approaches. This LDPC solution targets performance enhancement in wireless communication systems and has been deployed on a multi-frequency time-division multiple-access (MF-TDMA) satellite link to assess its overall behavior, demonstrating improved performance with reduced resource usage.