A DSP Reed-Solomon coder

Reed-Solomon (RS) codes are used in many of today´s communications systems. RS codes use finite field arithmetic which DSPs don´t implement efficiently. In previous RS hardware designs, a unique hardware solution was designed for each system. In this paper we describe a single hardware design which is programmable. This device was designed to run in parallel with a DSP The DSP would download the RS function to the coder which would enable the DSP more MIPS for other functions