Design of a (255, 239) Reed-Solomon decoder using a simplified step-by-step algorithm

This paper presents the design of a new (255, 239) Reed-Solomon (RS) decoder using a simplified step-by-step algorithm. For calculating the syndrome determinant in the RS decoder, the proposed architecture performs Gauss elimination on a 1-D systolic array that has lower hardware complexity and is more suited to be used on a higher-dimension matrix with the step-by-step algorithm. The proposed architecture, designed in 0.18 μm CMOS technology, has approximately 25K gates, and consumes approximately 40 mW at 250 MHz.