To address the issues of excessive resource consumption and
long critical paths in existing architectures, this paper proposes a
fully pipelined polar code belief propagation (BP) decoder architecture
based on precomputation units. This architecture employs different
precomputation units at different pipeline stages, reducing hardware
resources without compromising decoding performance. A novel arithmetic
unit is introduced for logical operations, which shortens the longest
critical path and enables higher decoder operating frequencies. By
eliminating the need for early termination of iterations and omitting
computations for certain pipeline stages, the design reduces the number
of pipeline stages without affecting decoding performance. The synthesis
results on the TSMC 28 nm process indicate that the designed decoder,
with a code length of 512, occupies an area of
, operates at a frequency of 3333 MHz, and achieves a resource
efficiency of 572.6 (Gbit/s)/
. Comparisons with existing polar code decoder architectures demonstrate
varying degrees of improvement.