  In this paper, we study the connection between polar codes and product codes.
Our analysis shows that the product of two polar codes is again a polar code,
and we provide guidelines to compute its frozen set on the basis of the frozen
sets of the component polar codes. Moreover, we show how polar codes can be
described as irregular product codes. We propose a two-step decoder for long
polar codes taking advantage of this dual nature to heavily reduce decoding
latency. Finally, we show that the proposed decoding technique outperforms both
standard polar codes and state-of-the-art codes for optical communications
under latency constraints.
