Alantro Communications specializes in the design and development of all types of forward error control (FEC) and modulation/demodulation elements. Alantro’s founders are experts in both current and leading-edge FEC technology (such as turbo codes).  Additionally, Alantro has ASIC design and implementation expertise to create highly-integrated, high-performing PHY chips and chip cores.

Forward error control allows the full capacity of a given communications channel to be approached.  Since the late 1940’s, more and more powerful FEC schemes have been discovered and implemented. Forward error control codes such as binary convolutional codes and Reed-Solomon codes have been used for years to do everything from increasing the range of deep space probes to exploiting the full capacity of analog wireline modems.
 
However, it has just recently become practical to implement more complex forward error control algorithms into cost-sensitive commercial applications.  This is because the increasing densities in integrated circuitry allow more gates (and therefore, more complex algorithms) in smaller chips.

There is an art to designing FECs.  Different designs of the same FEC codes can result in very different physical layer performance.  Alantro’s leading-edge FEC and modulation/demodulation methods offer a measurable advantage over competitors in performance, size (gate count), and noise margin.  Some of the modulation/demodulation methods Alantro employs are:  

• Adaptive Equalization
• Digital Timing/Carrier Recovery
• Digital Rate Control.   

Some of the FEC methodology Alantro uses in its PHY designs are:

• Reed-Solomon coding
• Interleaving
• Binary convolutional coding
• Trellis coding
• Viterbi decoding
• Turbo Coding 

Turbo codes are a new and powerful class of FEC that were discovered in 1993. Turbo codes performance greatly exceeds that of previous generations of FEC. Alantro Communications is actively developing and deploying turbo codes into modern digital communications to further exploit the capacity channels from hard disk drives to coax cables to satellite links.