  Polar codes are a recently proposed family of provably capacity-achieving
error-correction codes that received a lot of attention. While their
theoretical properties render them interesting, their practicality compared to
other types of codes has not been thoroughly studied. Towards this end, in this
paper, we perform a comparison of polar decoders against LDPC and Turbo
decoders that are used in existing communications standards. More specifically,
we compare both the error-correction performance and the hardware efficiency of
the corresponding hardware implementations. This comparison enables us to
identify applications where polar codes are superior to existing
error-correction coding solutions as well as to determine the most promising
research direction in terms of the hardware implementation of polar decoders.
