Direct Root Computation Architecture for Algebraic Soft-Decision Decoding of Reed-Solomon Codes

Algebraic soft-decision decoding (Koetter and Vardy, 2003) is a recent breakthrough in decoding of Reed-Solomon codes and it achieves significant decoding gain over conventional hard-decision decoding. In the bivariate polynomial factorization step of the new decoding algorithm, solving polynomial equations is required and it may contribute to a significant portion of the overall decoding latency. This paper presents a low-latency direct root computation architecture, which should lead to a factorization architecture that is of lower latency and more area efficient