Creonic Participates in Horizon 2020 EPIC Research Project

Kaiserslautern, Germany, Dec. 21, 2020 — Creonic GmbH worked under the coordinated efforts of Technikon, an Austrian company, with eight partners from seven European countries on the EPIC Project as part of the Horizon 2020 EU Program.

EPIC project developed a framework and created a database to evaluate and drive FEC techniques as key enablers of practicable beyond 5G wireless Terabit/s solutions. Beyond-5G applications are expected to require wireless data rates in the Tb/s range in a power envelope in the order of some Watts.

In the past, progress in microelectronic silicon technology driven by Moore’s law was an enabler of large leaps in throughput, lower latency, or lower power.

We have now reached a point where microelectronics can no longer keep pace with the increased requirements of communication systems, especially with respect to energy efficiency for wireless transceivers, which have tightly constrained power and energy budgets. Thus, the complexity of implementing advanced FEC schemes to operate at Tb/s data rates is critical.

Advanced channel coding schemes are necessary to achieve outstanding communications performance, of which Turbo-, LDPC-, and Polar Codes are the most promising. However, these solutions come with considerable implementation challenges, especially when targeting stringent power constraints. The EPIC project addressed these challenges and developed implementation-ready FEC technology for these code families, which meet the cost and performance requirements of future wireless Tb/s use-cases.

EPIC methodology differentiates itself by combining code construction, decoding algorithm design and architecture/implementation in a holistic way, allowing for optimization over larger domains. The project designed a thorough and detailed design framework based on EPIC Design Space Exploration (DSE). This novel and disruptive approach has enabled the partners to develop unrivaled codes, encoder and decoder architectures. The consortium has been able to demonstrate world-leading performance by providing order-of-magnitude performance improvements with respect to 5G systems and by delivering next generation FEC classes.