%0 Journal Article %T Fast Software Polar Decoders %A Pascal Giard %A Gabi Sarkis %A Claude Thibeault %A Warren J. Gross %J Computer Science %D 2013 %I arXiv %R 10.1109/ICASSP.2014.6855069 %X Among error-correcting codes, polar codes are the first to provably achieve channel capacity with an explicit construction. In this work, we present software implementations of a polar decoder that leverage the capabilities of modern general-purpose processors to achieve an information throughput in excess of 200 Mbps, a throughput well suited for software-defined-radio applications. We also show that, for a similar error-correction performance, the throughput of polar decoders both surpasses that of LDPC decoders targeting general-purpose processors and is competitive with that of state-of-the-art software LDPC decoders running on graphic processing units. %U http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.6311v2