Early-termination techniques for a belief-propagation (BP) decoder of polar codes can improve the decoding throughput by finishing a decoding iteration when an early-termination condition is satisfied. In the BP decoders, the early-termination condition plays an important role, as it affects decoding iteration savings. In this letter, an area-efficient early-termination criterion is proposed, which simplifies the previous threshold-based termination condition by completely eliminating redundant computations. According to the experimental results, the proposed structure for (1024, 512) polar codes can reduce 72.7%, 66.5%, and 59.7% of hardware resources without any degradation in the error-correction performance and decoding throughput compared to the previous threshold-based, information-BER (bit error rate)-based, and frozen-BER-based early-termination techniques, respectively.
Area-Efficient Early-Termination Technique for Belief-Propagation Polar Decoders