Zipper Codes: High-rate Spatially-coupled Codes with Algebraic Component Codes

Zipper codes, a new framework for describing spatially-coupled product-like codes, are introduced. This framework encompasses many types of codes such as staircase codes and braided block codes. New types of codes such as tiled and delayed diagonal zipper codes are also introduced. Simulation results show that these new type of codes achieve comparable performance to staircase codes while requiring less memory. This thesis also analyzes the types of stall patterns that can arise in zipper codes and how they affect the error floor. Finally, the impact of error-and-erasure decoding in zipper codes is also studied. Software simulation results show that adding erasure symbols improves the coding gain by around 0.1 dB with only a small increase in memory overhead and decoding complexity.M.A.S