A Processor Accelerator for Software Decoding of BCH Codes

The BCH code is one of the well-known error correction codes and its decoding contains many operations in Galois field. These operations require many instruction steps or large memory area for look-up tables on ordinary processors. While dedicated hardware BCH decoders achieves higher decoding speed than software, the advantage of software decoding is its flexibility to decode BCH codes of variable parameters. In this paper, an auxiliary circuit to be embedded in a pipelined processor is proposed which accelerates software decoding of various BCH codes.