A method to improve the design of new radio physical downlink control channel (NR-PDCCH) transmission and to reduce the false alarm rate of NR-PDCCH blind decoding is proposed. The downlink control information (DCI) bits are carried by NR-PDCCH to be transmitted to UEs after CRC attachment, channel encoding, interleaving, and modulation. The proposed NR-PDCCH design is separated into two parts. In a first part, a UE-ID or RNTI is used to derive a CRC mask or a scrambling sequence for CRC attachment of the DCI bits. In a second part, a UE-specific ID is used to derive an interleaver before or after channel encoding of the DCI bits. If the interleaver is placed before channel encoding, it takes the form of a bit interleaver. If the interleaver is placed after channel encoding, it takes the form of a bit interleaver or a channel interleaver.