New degree computationless modified Euclid algorithm and architecture for Reed-Solomon decoder

This paper proposes a new degree computationless modified Euclid (DCME) algorithm and its dedicated architecture for Reed-Solomon (RS) decoder. This architecture has low hardware complexity compared with conventional modified Euclid (ME) architectures, since it can completely remove the degree computation and comparison circuits. The architecture employing a systolic array requires only the latency of 2t clock cycles to solve the key equation without initial latency. In addition, the DCME architecture using 3t + 2 basic cells has regularity and scalability since it uses only one processing element. Hence, the proposed DCME architecture provides the short latency and low-cost RS decoding. The DCME architecture has been synthesized using the 0.25-mu m Faraday CMOS standard cell library and operates at 200 MHz. The gate count of the DCME architecture is 21760. Hence, the RS decoder using the proposed DCME architecture can reduce the total gate count by at least 23% and the total latency to at least 10% compared with conventional ME decoders.