Efficient protection of polar decoders against Single Event Upsets (SEUs) on user memories

Polar codes are used in 5G systems for the transmission of control channels due to their excellent error correction capability for short sequences. CRC aided successive cancellation list (CA-SCL) decoders are commonly used in practical systems. When used in critical environments, e.g. space platforms, memories used in the polar decoder will suffer single-event upsets (SEUs) that can cause failures and disrupt communications. Therefore, the protection of polar decoders against SEUs on memories with low overhead is an important problem, especially for resource-limited on-board space systems. In this paper, efficient protection schemes are first proposed for each of the main memory components of CA-SAL decoders based on their algorithmic properties. Then FPGA implementation and hardware-based fault injection experiments are performed to evaluate the protection overhead and reliability of the proposed schemes. Experimental results show that, relative to the unprotected decoder, the reliability of the decoder is improved by more than two orders of magnitude, and the overhead of memory and computation are only about 1.26 and 1.23 times of those of unprotected decoder.