AN 846: Intel® Stratix® 10 Forward Error Correction

ID 683805
Date 7/02/2018
Public
Document Table of Contents

5.4. FEC Decoders

Table 7.  FEC Decoder Types
Decoder Type Description
Hard decision FEC Makes exact decisions of 1s or 0s. Good gain versus complexity. Broadly used in most applications. 10GBASE-KR/KR4/KP4 are all examples of hard decision FECs. Used in Intel® Stratix® 10 TX devices.
Soft decision FEC Makes decisions based on probabilities of a 1 or 0. Provides higher gain and allows you to get closer to the Shannon limit. Complex design used in higher end optical transport networking (OTN) systems, specifically coherent systems. Normally used in cellular communications using the Viterbi algorithm.