Fully parallel low‐density parity‐check code‐based polar decoder architecture for 5G wireless communications

Abstract

A hardware architecture is presented to decode (N, K) polar codes based on a low‐density parity‐check code‐like decoding method. By applying suitable pruning techniques to the dense graph of the polar code, the decoder architectures are optimized using fewer check nodes (CN) and variable nodes (VN). Pipelining is introduced in the CN and VN architectures, reducing the critical path delay. Latency is reduced further by a fully parallelized, single‐stage architecture compared with the log N stages in the conventional belief propagation (BP) decoder. The designed decoder for short‐to‐intermediate code lengths was implemented using the Virtex‐7 field‐programmable gate array (FPGA). It achieved a throughput of 2.44 Gbps, which is four times and 1.4 times higher than those of the fast‐simplified successive cancellation and combinational decoders, respectively. The proposed decoder for the (1024, 512) polar code yielded a negligible bit error rate of 10⁻⁴ at 2.7 E_b/N_o (dB). It converged faster than the BP decoding scheme on a dense parity‐check matrix. Moreover, the proposed decoder is also implemented using the Xilinx ultra‐scale FPGA and verified with the fifth generation new radio physical downlink control channel specification. The superior error‐correcting performance and better hardware efficiency makes our decoder a suitable alternative to the successive cancellation list decoders used in 5G wireless communication.