• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.16 no.5
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• pp.550-556
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• 2016

Polar codes are one of the most favorable capacity-achieving codes due to their simple structure and low decoding complexity. However, because of the disappointing decoding performance realized using conventional successive cancellation (SC) decoders, polar codes cannot be used directly in practical applications. In contrast to conventional SC decoders, list SC (SCL) decoders with large list sizes (e.g. 32) achieve performances very close to those of maximum-likelihood (ML) decoders. In SCL decoders with large list sizes, however, hardware increase is a severe problem because an SCL decoder with list size L consists of L copies of an SC decoder. In this paper, we present a low-area SCL decoder architecture that applies the proposed merged processing element-sharing (MPES) algorithm. A merged processing element (MPE) is the basic processing unit in SC decoders, and the required number of MPEs is L(N-1) in conventional SCL decoders. Using the proposed algorithm reduces the number of MPEs by about 70% compared with conventional SCL decoders when the list size is larger than 32.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.658-675
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• 2022

This paper presents a fast-simplified successive cancellation (SC) flipping (Fast-SSC-Flip) decoding algorithm for polar code. Firstly, by researching the probability distribution of the number of error bits in a node caused by channel noise in simplified-SC (SSC) decoder, a measurement criterion of node reliability is proposed. Under the guidance of the criterion, the most unreliable nodes are firstly located, then the unreliable bits are selected for flipping, so as to realize Fast-SSC-Flip decoding algorithm based on node reliability (NR-Fast-SSC-Flip). Secondly, we extended the proposed NR-Fast-SSC-Flip to multiple node (NR-Fast-SSC-Flip-ω) by considering dynamic update to measure node reliability, where ω is the order of flip-nodes set. The extended algorithm can correct the error bits in multiple nodes, and get good performance at medium and high signal-to-noise (SNR) region. Simulation results show that the proposed NR-Fast-SSC-Flip decoder can obtain 0.27dB and 0.17dB gains, respectively, compared with the traditional Fast-SSC-Flip [14] and the newly proposed two-bit-flipping Fast-SSC (Fast-SSC-2Flip-E2) [18] under the same conditions. Compared with the newly proposed partitioned Fast-SSC-Flip (PA-Fast-SSC-Flip) (s=4) [18], the proposed NR-Fast-SSC-Flip-ω (ω=2) decoder can obtain about 0.21dB gain, and the FER performance exceeds the cyclic-redundancy-check (CRC) aided SC-list (CRC-SCL) decoder (L=4).