Abstract
This work presents the first integration of a message-passing detector (MPD) and a polar decoder. A soft-output MPD, which is essential to approach the channel capacity, is first proposed. Compared to the state-of-the-art design, the proposed MPD achieves a 6.9x higher throughput with 49% lower energy, despite the soft outputs. The proposed polar decoder achieves a 1.35x higher throughput with comparable energy. The chip delivers a throughput of 7.61Gb/s for massive MIMO systems with up to 128 antennas and 32 users.