Two programmable BCH soft decoders for high rate codes with large word length

In this paper, two BCH soft decoders are proposed suitable for high rate codes with medium to large word length. The proposed decoders provide a programmable performance gain, with a reduced critical path allowing for an increase upto m/2 times the operating frequency of algebraic decoders, where m is the Galois field size. Our proposed decoders operate only on the least reliable bits, which leads to a reduction in the decoder complexity by removing the Chien search procedure.