Use of the RS decoder as an RS encoder for two-way digital communications and storage systems

It is shown that any Reed-Solomon (RS) decoder which corrects both errors and erasures also can be used as an encoder for the RS code. This technique eliminates the need of a separate subsystem, namely the RS encoder in either two-way digital communication systems or storage devices which use RS encoding and decoding. As a consequence a single RS decoder chip which corrects both errors and erasures can be mass-manufactured for use in all two-way communication systems and storage devices such as a digital video-cassette recorder (VCR) or a write-once, read-many, (WORM) optical disk drive