Area efficient parallel decoder architecture for long BCH codes

Long BCH codes achieve additional coding gain of around 0.6 dB compared to Reed-Solomon codes with similar code rate used for long-haul optical communication systems. For our considered parallel decoder architecture, a novel group matching scheme is proposed to reduce the overall hardware complexity of both Chien search and syndrome generator units by 46% for BCH(2047, 1926, 23) code as opposed to only 22% if directly applying the iterative matching algorithm. The proposed scheme exploits the substructure sharing within a finite field multiplier (FFM) and among groups of FFMs.