Articles | Volume 3
https://doi.org/10.5194/ars-3-271-2005
https://doi.org/10.5194/ars-3-271-2005
12 May 2005
 | 12 May 2005

Implementation and modeling of parametrizable high-speed Reed Solomon decoders on FPGAs

A. Flocke, H. Blume, and T. G. Noll

Abstract. One of the most important error correction codes in digital signal processing is the Reed Solomon code. A lot of VLSI implementations have been described in literature. This paper introduces a highly parametrizable RS-decoder for FPGAs. By implementing resource-sharing and by using a fully pipelined multiplier/adder-unit in GF(2m) it was possible to achieve high throughput rates up to 1.3Gbit/s on a standard FPGA, while using only an attractive small amount of logical elements (LE). The implementation, written in a hardware description language (HDL), is based on an inversionless Berlekamp Algorithm (iBA), whose structure leads to a chain of identical processing elements (PE). The critical path of one PE runs only through one adder and one multiplier. A detailed description of a resource-sharing methodology for this Berlekamp Algorithm and the achievable gain are presented in this paper.

The benchmarking for the design was done for different 8bit-codes against state-of-the-art FPGA-solutions and showed a gain of up to a factor of six regarding the AT-product, compared to other implementations.