Latency and Complexity Analysis of Flexible Semi-Parallel Decoding Architectures for 5G NR Polar Codes

Polar codes are one of the most recent additions to the family of forward error correction (FEC) codes, having recently been adopted in the 5G New Radio (NR) standard for the control channel. However, the stringent requirements introduced by the 5G standard in terms of block length and code rate flexibility, along with low end-to-end latency and high error correction performance represent a major challenge for their hardware implementation. In this context, we study the impact of main code and decoder design parameters on the latency, throughput, and the hardware complexity of semi-parallel decoding architectures. The impact of these parameters on the hardware efficiency of semi-parallel architectures is significant. Therefore, we propose two multi-frame decoding approaches that increase the throughput and improve the utilisation rate of the processing units of these architectures. Detailed analytical and logic synthesis results are provided and compared for a large range of values in order to constitute a reference for the implementation of flexible, yet efficient FEC decoders for polar codes.