Communicating information via the internet and other digital communications systems has become common in the United States and elsewhere. As the number of people using these communications systems has increased, so has the need for transmitting digital data at ever increasing rates.
Information transmitted by a digital communications system is typically encoded and transmitted as a series of information code words. Encoding is used to improve the overall performance of a digital communications system. In addition to encoding information prior to transmission, many digital communications systems also calculate groups of bits or code words that are appended to a group of information bits prior to transmission. These bits or code words may be used by a signal decoder of a receiver to detect and/or correct bit errors that can occur during transmission. Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) bits are an example of bits appended to a group of information bits prior to transmission. These bits are used by a signal decoder to detect and/or correct bit errors.
Typically, the bits and/or code words appended to a group of information bits for transmission form part of a cyclic code or a systematic cyclic code. Cyclic codes or more particularly systematic cyclic codes are often generated using a linear feedback shift register (LFSR) designed to implement a particular generator polynomial or a particular parity polynomial. The generation of a systematic cyclic code typically involves three operations. These operations are: (1) multiplying an information signal, U(x), by Xn-k; (2) dividing the product U(x)·Xn-k by a generator polynomial G(x) to obtain a remainder R(x); and (3) adding R(x) to U(x)·Xn-k.
Systems and methods for generating cyclic codes exist. These conventional systems and methods, however, have limitations that prevent them from operating at high data rates. In particular, the nested feedback loops of the LFSR used to generate the code words form a speed bottleneck.
Conventional techniques such as look-ahead, pipelining, and parallelism are often used to overcome speed bottlenecks in digital communications systems. These conventional techniques, however, cannot always be applied successfully to design digital communications systems that will operate at a data rate in excess of 2 Gb/s. Applying these conventional techniques is particularly difficult, for example, when dealing with nested feedback loops such as the feedback loops of a linear feedback shift register used to generate the code words of a cyclic code.
There are several approaches, for example, that can be used in applying look-ahead in the context of a circuit having nested feedback loops. Many of these approaches will not, however, improve the performance of the digital circuit to which they are applied, and some of these approaches can even degrade circuit performance or improve the performance in a less-than-linear manner with respect to look-ahead factor. This is due at least in part because look-ahead networks may increase the iteration bound of a circuit. In similar fashion, the application of conventional pipelining and parallelism techniques to nested feedback loops in high speed digital communications systems will not necessarily result in improved performance. Applying these conventional techniques leads to fan-out problems in a high speed digital communications system, and thus they cannot be used to overcome speed bottlenecks caused by nested feedback loops in a high speed digital communications system.
There is a current need for new design techniques and digital logic circuits that can be used to build high-speed digital communication systems. In particular, there is a current need for new systems and methods for generating cyclic codes for error control in digital communication systems that do not create speed bottlenecks and prevent digital communications systems from operating at high data rates.