Hard-Decision SCL Polar Decoder With Weighted Pruning Operation for Storage Applications

In this paper, we present a novel weighted pruning method that effectively reduces the processing latency of the hard-decision (HD) polar decoder for storage applications without compromising the error-correcting capability. Based on the previous Fast-SSCL-SPC decoding algorithm, we thoroughly analyze the cause of the performance degradation when using HD inputs. Introducing a weighted operation on the least reliable internal value, the proposed HD decoding method successfully avoids faulty updates of codeword candidates. Furthermore, we demonstrate the HD decoder architecture that incorporates the proposed pruning scheme, reducing the decoding latency by 22% compared to the state-of-the-art design for 0.9-rate 4096b storage-aware polar codes while maintaining a similar error-correcting capability and hardware complexity.