Design of low area list successive cancellation decoder for polar codes

Polar codes are the first constructive and provable capacity-achieving codes. Compared to conventional successive cancellation (SC) decoders, SCL (list SC) decoders have performances very close to those of the maximum-likelihood (ML) decoders. In SCL decoders with large list size, however, the hardware increase is a severe problem since an SCL decoder with list size L consists of L copies of SC decoders. In this paper, a low area SCL decoder architecture is proposed. It is shown that the proposed SCL decoder can reduce about 70% merged processing elements compared with conventional SCL decoders when the list size is larger than 32.