# A novel soft-aided bit-marking decoder for product codes

## TL;DR

This paper presents a new soft-aided hard-decision decoder for product codes that uses bit marking with updated reliabilities, achieving significant performance improvements over existing decoding methods.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a novel soft-aided bit-marking decoding algorithm that enhances product code decoding by incorporating iterative reliability updates.

## Key findings

- Up to 0.8 dB gain over standard iterative bounded distance decoding
- Up to 0.3 dB gain over previous bit-marking decoder
- Demonstrates improved decoding performance with the proposed method

## Abstract

We introduce a novel soft-aided hard-decision decoder for product codes adopting bit marking via updated reliabilities at each decoding iteration. Gains up to 0.8 dB vs. standard iterative bounded distance decoding and up to 0.3 dB vs. our previously proposed bit-marking decoder are demonstrated.