Bridging the Complexity Gap in Tb/S-Achieving THz-Band Baseband Processing

Recent advances in electronic and photonic technologies have allowed efficient signal generation and transmission at terahertz (THz) frequencies. However, as the gap in THz-operating devices narrows, the demand for terabit-per-second (Tb/s)-achieving circuits is increasing. Translating the available hundreds of gigahertz (GHz) of bandwidth into a Tb/s data rate requires processing thousands of information bits per clock cycle at state-of-the-art clock frequencies of digital baseband processing circuitry of a few GHz. This article addresses these constraints and emphasizes the importance of parallelization in signal processing, particularly for channel code decoding. By leveraging structured sub-spaces of THz channels, we propose mapping bits to transmission resources using shorter code-words, extending parallelizability across all baseband processing blocks. THz channels exhibit quasi-deterministic frequency, time, and space structures that enable efficient parallel bit mapping at the source and provide pseudo-soft bit reliability information for efficient detection and decoding at the receiver.