An area-efficient pipelined VLSI architecture for decoding of Reed-Solomon codes based on a time-domain algorithm

Reed-Solomon (RS) codes have been widely used in a variety of communication systems to protect digital data against errors occurring in the transmission process. Since the decoding process for RS codes is rather computation-extensive, special-purpose hardware structures are often necessary for it to meet the real-time requirements. In this paper, an area-efficient pipelined very large scale integration (VLSI) architecture is proposed for RS decoding. The architecture is developed based on a time domain algorithm using the remainder decoding concept. A prominent feature of the proposed system is that, for a t-error-correcting RS code with block length n, it involves only 2t consecutive symbols to compute a discrepancy value in the decoding process, instead of n consecutive symbols used in the previous RS decoders based on the same algorithm without using the remainder decoding concept. The proposed RS decoder can process one data block every n clock cycles, i.e., the average decoding rate is one symbol per clock cycle. As compared to a similar pipelined RS decoder with the same decoding rate, it gains significant improvements in hardware complexity and latency.