Hardware implementation of a soft cancellation decoder for polar codes

Polar Codes can provably achieve the capacity of discrete memoryless channels. In order to make practical, it is necessary to propose efficient hardware decoder architectures. In this paper, the first hardware decoder architecture implementing the Soft-output CANcellation (SCAN) decoding algorithm, is presented. This decoder was implemented on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices. The proposed architecture is parametrizable for any number of iterations without adding hardware complexity. The SCAN decoder architecture is compared to another soft-output decoder that implements a Belief Propagation (BP) algorithm. The SCAN decoder can reach a higher throughput than a BP decoder, with a lower memory footprint. Moreover, only one iteration with the SCAN algorithm leads to better decoding performance than 50 iterations of the BP algorithm.