  Families of "asymptotically regular" LDPC block code ensembles can be formed
by terminating (J,K)-regular protograph-based LDPC convolutional codes. By
varying the termination length, we obtain a large selection of LDPC block code
ensembles with varying code rates, minimum distance that grows linearly with
block length, and capacity approaching iterative decoding thresholds, despite
the fact that the terminated ensembles are almost regular. In this paper, we
investigate the properties of the quasi-cyclic (QC) members of such an
ensemble. We show that an upper bound on the minimum Hamming distance of
members of the QC sub-ensemble can be improved by careful choice of the
component protographs used in the code construction. Further, we show that the
upper bound on the minimum distance can be improved by using arrays of
circulants in a graph cover of the protograph.
