Ultra High-Speed BP Decoder for Polar Codes achieving 1.4 Tbps in 28 nm CMOS

In this paper, we propose pipelining and unrolling schemes for ultra-high speed belief propagation polar decoders. The proof of concept implementation in 28 nm CMOS technology achieves 1380 Gbps of coded throughput with a short polar codeword length of 512 bits, placing it as one of the fastest soft-decision FEC implementations published so far. With a codeword of length 1024 bits, the decoding throughput can be even higher. Moreover, the decoder shows better error correction performance than other ultra-high speed polar decoders published recently. The consumed chip area is 5.98 mm
²
, and the chip uses five unrolled iterations with constant quantization of four bits at every processing stage.