  Staircase codes play an important role as error-correcting codes in optical
communications. In this paper, a low-complexity method for resolving stall
patterns when decoding staircase codes is described. Stall patterns are the
dominating contributor to the error floor in the original decoding method. Our
improvement is based on locating stall patterns by intersecting non-zero
syndromes and flipping the corresponding bits. The approach effectively lowers
the error floor and allows for a new range of block sizes to be considered for
optical communications at a certain rate or, alternatively, a significantly
decreased error floor for the same block size. Further, an improved error floor
analysis is introduced which provides a more accurate estimation of the
contributions to the error floor.
