A 506Gbit/s Polar Successive Cancellation List Decoder with CRC

Polar codes have recently attracted significant attention due to their excellent error-correction capabilities. However, efficient decoding of Polar codes for high throughput is very challenging. Beyond 5G, data rates towards 1Tbit/s are expected. Low complexity decoding algorithms like Successive Cancellation (SC) decoding enable such high throughput but suffer on errorcorrection performance. Polar Successive Cancellation List (SCL) decoders, with and without Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC), exhibit a much better error-correction but imply higher implementation cost. In this paper we in-depth investigate and quantify various trade-offs of these decoding algorithms with respect to error-correction capability and implementation costs in terms of area, throughput and energy efficiency in a 28nm CMOS FD-SOI technology. We present a framework that automatically generates decoder architectures for throughputs beyond 100Gbit/s. This framework includes various architectural optimizations for SCL decoders that go beyond State-of-the-Art. We demonstrate a 506Gbit/s SCL decoder with CRC that was generated by this framework.