An Unfolded Pipelined Polar Decoder With Hybrid Number Representations for Multi-User MIMO Systems

Next generation wireless communication introduces ultra high speed and low latency requirements to baseband processors, especially for multi-user multiple-input-multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems. Polar codes, as the channel coding scheme in the control plane of 5G eMBB scenario, still cannot satisfy the hardware implementation requirements of polar decoders for MU-MIMO systems. In this brief, a high throughput and low latency polar decoder is proposed for MU-MIMO systems. The decoding architecture is fully unfolded to maximize hardware parallelism, and is fully pipelined by decoupling the round-trip scheduling datapath to enable simultaneous processing of multiple codewords. Besides, a hybrid decoding datapath is introduced by proposing complementary decoding units with mixed data representations to reduce hardware complexity. For (1024, 512) polar codes, a decoding throughput of 100.6 Gbps is achieved, and the latency is 0.43 us when 36 users are processed simultaneously.

[1]  Keshab K. Parhi,et al.  Architectures for polar BP decoders using folding , 2014, 2014 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS).

[2]  Zhengya Zhang,et al.  A 4.68Gb/s belief propagation polar decoder with bit-splitting register file , 2014, 2014 Symposium on VLSI Circuits Digest of Technical Papers.

[3]  Karri Ranta-aho,et al.  Spectrum for 5G: Global Status, Challenges, and Enabling Technologies , 2018, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[4]  Dennis Hui,et al.  Channel Coding in 5G New Radio: A Tutorial Overview and Performance Comparison with 4G LTE , 2018, IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazine.

[5]  Ji Chen,et al.  High-Throughput and Energy-Efficient Belief Propagation Polar Code Decoder , 2017, IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems.

[6]  Keshab K. Parhi,et al.  Early Stopping Criteria for Energy-Efficient Low-Latency Belief-Propagation Polar Code Decoders , 2014, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing.

[7]  Keshab K. Parhi,et al.  Architecture optimizations for BP polar decoders , 2013, 2013 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing.

[8]  Chia-Hsiang Yang,et al.  A 501mW 7.6lGb/s integrated message-passing detector and decoder for polar-coded massive MIMO systems , 2017, 2017 Symposium on VLSI Circuits.

[9]  Erdal Arikan,et al.  Channel Polarization: A Method for Constructing Capacity-Achieving Codes for Symmetric Binary-Input Memoryless Channels , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

[10]  Zhongfeng Wang,et al.  A high throughput belief propagation decoder architecture for polar codes , 2016, 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS).

[11]  Rahul Shrestha,et al.  High-Throughput and High-Speed Polar-Decoder VLSI-Architecture for 5G New Radio , 2019, 2019 32nd International Conference on VLSI Design and 2019 18th International Conference on Embedded Systems (VLSID).

[12]  Zhongfeng Wang,et al.  A memory efficient belief propagation decoder for polar codes , 2015, China Communications.