Hardware Implementation of Successive-Cancellation Decoders for Polar Codes

The recently-discovered polar codes are seen as a major breakthrough in coding theory; they provably achieve the theoretical capacity of discrete memoryless channels using the low-complexity successive cancellation decoding algorithm. Motivated by recent developments in polar coding theory, we propose a family of efficient hardware implementations for successive cancellation (SC) polar decoders. We show that such decoders can be implemented with O(N) processing elements and O(N) memory elements. Furthermore, we show that SC decoding can be implemented in the logarithmic domain, thereby eliminating costly multiplication and division operations, and reducing the complexity of each processing element greatly. We also present a detailed architecture for an SC decoder and provide logic synthesis results confirming the linear complexity growth of the decoder as the code length increases.