Optical LDPC decoders for beyond 100 Gbits/s optical transmission

We present an optical low-density parity-check (LDPC) decoder suitable for implementation above 100 Gbits/s, which provides large coding gains when based on large-girth LDPC codes. We show that a basic building block, the probabilities multiplier circuit, can be implemented using a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, and we propose corresponding probabilistic-domain sum-product algorithm (SPA). We perform simulations of a fully parallel implementation employing girth-10 LDPC codes and proposed SPA. The girth-10 LDPC(24015,19212) code of the rate of 0.8 outperforms the BCH (128,113)×BCH(256,239) turbo-product code of the rate of 0.82 by 0.91 dB (for binary phase-shift keying at 100 Gbits/s and a bit error rate of 10^-9), and provides a net effective coding gain of 10.09 dB.