High Throughput Polar Code Decoders with Information Bottleneck Quantization

TL;DR

This paper introduces optimized Fast-SSC polar code decoders using IB-based quantization, achieving significant area and energy efficiency improvements in 12 nm technology while maintaining error correction performance.

Contribution

It presents the first detailed implementation of IB-based quantization for polar decoders with placement and routing results, demonstrating notable efficiency gains.

Findings

Up to 16% area reduction

Up to 13% energy efficiency improvement

Maintains low FER at 10^-7 for N=1024, R=0.5

Abstract

In digital baseband processing, the forward error correction (FEC) unit belongs to the most demanding components in terms of computational complexity and power consumption. Hence, efficient implementation of FEC decoders is crucial for next generation mobile broadband standards and an ongoing research topic. Quantization has a significant impact on the decoder area, power consumption and throughput. Thus, lower bit-widths are preferred for efficient implementations but degrade the error-correction capability. To address this issue, a non-uniform quantization based on the Information Bottleneck (IB) method was proposed that enables a low bit width while maintaining the essential information. Many investigations on the use of IB method for Low-density parity-check code (LDPC) decoders exist and have shown its advantages from an implementation perspective. However, for polar code decoder implementations, there exists only one publication that is not based on the state-of-the-art Fast-SSC decoding algorithm, and only synthesis implementation results without energy estimation are shown. In contrast, our paper presents several optimized Fast Simplified Successive-Cancellation (Fast-SSC) polar code decoder implementations using IB-based quantization with placement&routing results in an advanced 12 nm FinFET technology. Gains of up to 16% in area and 13% in energy efficiency are achieved with IB-based quantization at a Frame Error Rate (FER) of 10-7 and a Polar Code of N = 1024, R = 0.5 compared to state-of-the-art decoders.