Embodiments of the present disclosure provide a transmitter, a receiver and methods of operating a transmitter and a receiver. In one embodiment, the transmitter includes an input padding module configured to provide padded bits having padding bits added to payload bits for one or more control channels, and a scrambling module configured to apply a masking sequence to one or more of the padded bits to generate scrambled bits. Additionally, the transmitter also includes an encoding module configured to perform forward error correction encoding and rate matching on the scrambled bits to obtain a required number of control channel output bits, and a transmit module configured to transmit the control channel output bits for one or more control channels.