Step-GRAND: A Low Latency Universal Soft-input Decoder
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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 ≤10^-7. Furthermore, the proposed step-GRAND hardware is 10× more area efficient than the previous soft-input ORBGRAND hardware implementation, and its worst-case latency is 1/6.8× that of the previous ORBGRAND hardware.
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