  Polar codes are a new family of error correction codes for which efficient
hardware architectures have to be defined for the encoder and the decoder.
Polar codes are decoded using the successive cancellation decoding algorithm
that includes partial sums computations. We take advantage of the recursive
structure of polar codes to introduce an efficient partial sums computation
unit that can also implements the encoder. The proposed architecture is
synthesized for several codelengths in 65nm ASIC technology. The area of the
resulting design is reduced up to 26% and the maximum working frequency is
improved by ~25%.
