High-Throughput and Flexible Belief Propagation List Decoder for Polar Codes

Due to its high parallelism, belief propagation (BP)decoding is amenable to high-throughput applications and thusrepresents a promising solution for the ultra-high peak datarate required by future communication systems. To bridge theperformance gap compared to the widely used successive cancel-lation list (SCL) decoding algorithm, BP list (BPL) decoding forpolar codes extends candidate codeword exploration via multiplepermuted factor graphs (PFGs) to improve the error-correctingperformance of BP decoding. However, it is a significant challengeto design a unified and flexible BPL hardware architecture thatsupports various PFGs and code configurations. In this paper,we present the first VLSI implementation of a BPL decoder forpolar codes that overcomes this implementation challenge with ahardware-friendly algorithm for on-the-fly flexible permutations.First, we introduce a sequential generation (SG) algorithm toobtain a near-optimal PFG set. Additionally, we demonstratethat any permutation can be decomposed into a combination ofmultiple fixed routings, and design a low-complexity permutationnetwork to generate graphs in an on-the-fly fashion. Our BPLdecoder has a low decoding latency by executing decoding andpermutation generation in parallel and supports arbitrary listsizes without area overhead. Experimental results based on 28nmFD-SOI technology show that for length-1024 polar codes witha code rate of one-half, our BPL decoder with 32 PFGs exhibitssimilar error-correcting performance to SCL with a list size of 4and achieves an average throughput of 25.63 Gbps and an areaefficiency of 29.46 Gbps/mm2, which is 1.82xand 4.33xfasterthan the state-of-the-art BP flip and SCL decoders, respectively