  Polar codes are the first class of forward error correction (FEC) codes with
a provably capacity-achieving capability. Using list successive cancellation
decoding (LSCD) with a large list size, the error correction performance of
polar codes exceeds other well-known FEC codes. However, the hardware
complexity of LSCD rapidly increases with the list size, which incurs high
usage of the resources on the field programmable gate array (FPGA) and
significantly impedes the practical deployment of polar codes. To alleviate the
high complexity, in this paper, two low-complexity decoding schemes and the
corresponding architectures for LSCD targeting FPGA implementation are
proposed. The architecture is implemented in an Altera Stratix V FPGA.
Measurement results show that, even with a list size of 32, the architecture is
able to decode a codeword of 4096-bit polar code within 150 us, achieving a
throughput of 27Mbps
