Fast Low-Complexity Decoders for Low-Rate Polar Codes

Abstract

Polar codes are capacity-achieving error-correcting codes with an explicit construction that can be decoded with low-complexity algorithms. In this work, we show how the state-of-the-art low-complexity decoding algorithm can be improved to better accommodate low-rate codes. More constituent codes are recognized in the updated algorithm and dedicated hardware is added to efficiently decode these new constituent codes. We also alter the polar code construction to further decrease the latency and increase the throughput with little to no noticeable effect on error-correction performance. Rate-flexible decoders for polar codes of length 1024 and 2048 are implemented on FPGA. Over the previous work, they are shown to have from 22% to 28% lower latency and 26% to 34% greater throughput when decoding low-rate codes. On 65 nm ASIC CMOS technology, the proposed decoder for a (1024, 512) polar code is shown to compare favorably against the state-of-the-art ASIC decoders. With a clock frequency of 400 MHz and a supply voltage of 0.8 V, it has a latency of 0.41 $\mu$s and an area efficiency of 1.8 Gbps/mm${}^2$ for an energy efficiency of 77 pJ/info. bit. At 600 MHz with a supply of 1 V, the latency is reduced to 0.27 $\mu$s and the area efficiency increased to 2.7 Gbps/mm${}^2$ at 115 pJ/info. bit.

8 pages, 10 figures, submitted to Springer J. Signal Process. Syst

References in corpus (2)

• Performance and Construction of Polar Codes on Symmetric Binary-Input Memoryless Channels
• A High-Throughput Energy-Efficient Implementation of Successive-Cancellation Decoder for Polar Codes Using Combinational Logic

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Fast-SSC-Flip Decoding of Polar Codes
• Comparison of Polar Decoders with Existing Low-Density Parity-Check and Turbo Decoders
• Operation Merging for Hardware Implementations of Fast Polar Decoders
• Threshold-Based Fast Successive-Cancellation Decoding of Polar Codes
• A Two-staged Adaptive Successive Cancellation List Decoding for Polar Codes
• Implementation of a High-Throughput Fast-SSC Polar Decoder with Sequence Repetition Node
• A Constituent Codes Oriented Code Construction Scheme for Polar Code-Aim to Reduce the Decoding Latency