Concurrent error detection in Reed Solomon decoders

Abstract

Reed Solomon codes are widely used to identify and correct data errors in transmission and storage systems. When Reed Solomon (RS) codes are used for high reliable systems, the designer should take into account also for the occurrence of faults in the encoder and decoder blocks. In this paper a method to obtain a self-checking RS decoder is presented and different architectures for its implementation based on concurrent error detection are provided. The proposed method can be used for a wide range of different decoder algorithms with no intervention on the decoder architecture.