Hardware Decoders for Polar Codes: An Overview

TL;DR

This paper reviews various hardware decoder implementations for polar codes, highlighting their advantages in error correction, throughput, and complexity across different decoding algorithms.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art in hardware polar decoders, comparing successive-cancellation, belief propagation, and list decoding methods.

Findings

Successive-cancellation decoders offer low complexity.

List decoders improve error correction performance.

Belief propagation decoders enable parallel processing.

Abstract

Polar codes are an exciting new class of error correcting codes that achieve the symmetric capacity of memoryless channels. Many decoding algorithms were developed and implemented, addressing various application requirements: from error-correction performance rivaling that of LDPC codes to very high throughput or low-complexity decoders. In this work, we review the state of the art in polar decoders implementing the successive-cancellation, belief propagation, and list decoding algorithms, illustrating their advantages.