A minimum distance bound for quasi-nD-cyclic codes

We provide a new concatenated structure for multidimensional quasi-cyclic (Qn  DC) codes over FqFq and we give a trace representation for their codewords, which extends the known representations of QC and nD cyclic codes. Based on these results, we obtain a minimum distance bound for QnDC cyclic codes. Since QnDC codes are naturally related to nD convolutional codes, this bound also applies to a special class of 1-generator 2D convolutional codes.