Imagine using an online banking app to deposit money into your account.
Imagine using an online banking app to deposit money into your account. Like all information sent over the internet, those communications could be corrupted by noise that inserts errors into the data.
To overcome this problem, senders encode data before they are transmitted, and then a receiver uses a decoding algorithm to correct errors and recover the original message. In some instances, data are received with reliability information that helps the decoder figure out which parts of a transmission are likely errors.
Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have developed a decoder chip that employs a new statistical model to use this reliability information in a way that is much simpler and faster than conventional techniques.
Their chip uses a universal decoding algorithm the team previously developed, which can unravel any error correcting code. Typically, decoding hardware can only process one particular type of code. This new, universal decoder chip has broken the record for energy-efficient decoding, performing between 10 and 100 times better than other hardware.
Read more at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Image: Data sent to and from computers or mobile devices over a network are encoded so they aren't corrupted by noise. The ORBGRAND decoder chip can unravel any of these codes in a way that is much faster and more energy-efficient than other techniques. Credits: Courtesy of the researchers
