Design and Implementation of a Low-Complexity Reed-Solomon Decoder for Optical Communication Systems

A low-complexity Reed-Solomon (RS) decoder design based on the modified Euclidean (ME) algorithm proposed by Truong is presented in this paper. Low complexity is achieved by reformulating Truong's ME algorithm using the proposed polynomial manipulation scheme so that a more compact polynomial representation can be derived. Together with the developed folding scheme and simplified boundary cell, the resulting design effectively reduces the hardware complexity while meeting the throughput requirements of optical communication systems. Experimental results demonstrate that the developed RS(255, 239) decoder, implemented in the TSMC 0.18 mu m process, can operate at up to 425 MHz and achieve a throughput rate of 3.4 Gbps with a total gate count of 11,759. Compared to related works, the proposed decoder has the lowest area requirement and the smallest area-time complexity.