Enhanced upper bound for erasure recovery in SPC product codes

Single parity check (SPC) product codes are simple yet powerful codes that are used to correct errors and/or recover erasures. The focus of this paper is to evaluate the performance of such codes under erasure scenarios and to develop a closed-form tight upper bound for the postdecoding erasure rate. Closed-form exact expressions are derived for up to seven erasures. Previously published closed-form bounds assumed that all unrecoverable patterns should contain four erasures in a square. Additional non-square patterns are accounted for in the proposed expressions. The derived expressions are verified using exhaustive search. Eight or more erasures are accounted for by using a bound. The developed expressions improve the evaluation of the recoverability of SPC product codes without the need for simulation or search algorithms, whether exhaustive or novel.