On Path Memory in List Successive Cancellation Decoder of Polar Codes

摘要

Polar code is a breakthrough in coding theory. Using list successivecancellation decoding with large list size L, polar codes can achieve excellenterror correction performance. The L partial decoded vectors are stored in thepath memory and updated according to the results of list management. In thestate-of-the-art designs, the memories are implemented with registers and alarge crossbar is used for copying the partial decoded vectors from one blockof memory to another during the update. The architectures are quite area-costlywhen the code length and list size are large. To solve this problem, we proposetwo optimization schemes for the path memory in this work. First, a folded pathmemory architecture is presented to reduce the area cost. Second, we show ascheme that the path memory can be totally removed from the architecture.Experimental results show that these schemes effectively reduce the area ofpath memory.