A multilevel approach to the design of dc-free line codes

A multilevel approach to the design of dc-free line codes is presented. The different levels can be used for different purposes; for example, to control the maximum accumulated charge or to guarantee a certain minimum distance. The advantages of codes designed by this method over similar codes are the improved run-length/accumulated-charge parameters, higher transmission rate, and the systematic nature of the code construction. The multilevel structure allows the redundancy in the signal selection procedure to be allocated efficiently among the different levels. It also allows the use of suboptimal staged decoding procedures that have performance/complexity advantages over maximum-likelihood decoding.