Hardware implementation of a Reed-Solomon soft decoder based on information set decoding

Soft decision decoding of Reed-Solomon codes can largely improve frame errors rates over currently used hard decision decoding. In this paper, we present a new hardware implementation for soft decoding of Reed-Solomon codes based on information set decoding. To our best knowledge this is the first hardware implementation of information set decoding for long Reed-Solomon codes. We propose a reduced complexity version of the decoding algorithm, that is optimized for efficient hardware implementation and enables high throughput. The decoder was implemented on a Virtex 7 FPGA, achieving a gain of 0.75 dB compared to conventional hard decision decoding and a throughput of up to 1.19 GBit/s for the widely used RS(255,239). This gain in FER is achieved with less complexity and more than 15x larger throughput than other state-of-the-art architectures.