Method for correcting both errors and erasures of RS codes using error-only and erasure-only decoding algorithms

A method for correcting both errors and erasures of Reed-Solomon (RS) codes using error-only and erasure-only decoding algorithms is proposed. First, the method removes the effect of erasures from syndromes, then it uses error-only and erasure-only correcting processes to correct errors and erasures, respectively; thus, the overall decoding complexity can be reduced substantially. Furthermore, with hardware implementation, the most time-consuming operations in these two processes can be calculated concurrently to obtain a significant reduction of decoding latency.