An efficient recursive cell architecture of modified Euclid's algorithm for decoding Reed-Solomon codes

For decoding Reed-Solomon (RS) codes, the Belekamp-Messay algorithm, Euclid's algorithm and modified Euclid's algorithm (MEA) have been developed among which the MEA becomes the most popular decoding scheme. We propose an efficient recursive cell architecture suitable for the MEA. The proposed architecture uses about 25% less clock cycles required in the MEA operation than the conventional scheme. In addition, the number of recursive MEA cells can be reduced when the number of clock cycles spent in the MEA operation is larger than code word length n. Thereby buffer requirement for the received words can be reduced. For demonstration, the MEA circuitry for (128, 124) RS code has been described and the MEA operation is verified through VHDL modeling.