Generalized and Extended Product Codes

Generalized Product (GPC) Codes, an unification of Product Codes and Integrated Interleaved (II) Codes, are presented. Applications for approaches requiring local and global parities are described. The more general problem of extending product codes by adding global parities is studied and an upper bound on the minimum distance of such codes is obtained. Codes with one, two and three global parities whose minimum distances meet the bound are presented. Tradeoffs between optimality and field size are discussed.