  GRAND features both soft-input and hard-input variants that are well suited
to efficient hardware implementations that can be characterized with achievable
average and worst-case decoding latency. This paper introduces step-GRAND, a
soft-input variant of GRAND that, in addition to achieving appealing average
decoding latency, also reduces the worst-case decoding latency of the
corresponding hardware implementation. The hardware implementation results
demonstrate that the proposed step-GRAND can decode CA-polar code
$(128,105+11)$ with an average information throughput of $47.7$ Gbps at the
target FER of $\leq10^{-7}$. Furthermore, the proposed step-GRAND hardware is
$10\times$ more area efficient than the previous soft-input ORBGRAND hardware
implementation, and its worst-case latency is $\frac{1}{6.8}\times$ that of the
previous ORBGRAND hardware.
