Stochastic Chase Decoder for Reed-Solomon Codes

International audienceAbstract—This paper presents a hardware implementation of asoft-decision Reed-Solomon (RS) decoder, based on the stochasticChase algorithm. This decoder achieves a coding gain of at least0.45 dB at FER=10−4 for the well-known RS(255,239) code. Tothe best of our knowledge this is the highest reported codinggain for a hardware implementation of soft-decision RS(255,239)decoder. The decoder is implemented on a Virtex-5 FPGAand works at 800 Mb/s. The proposed decoder has a flexiblearchitecture and is well suited for applications requiring differentthroughputs and decoding performance