Low-energy configurable syndrome/chien search multi-channel Reed Solomon decoder

This paper presents a low-energy configurable syndrome/chien search pipelined Reed-Solomon RS (255, 239) decoder architecture using Euclidean algorithm. The configurable structure enables the syndrome and Chien search blocks to work either in serial mode which needs 255 clock cycle to finish, or in two parallel mode which needs 128 clock cycle to finish. The Euclidean algorithm block can be shared with 8 or 16 channels based on the required rate per channel. In serial mode, the configurable cells enable the Euclidean algorithm block to be shared between 16 channels each channel takes rate up to 4 Gbps. In two parallel mode, the configurable cells enable the Euclidean algorithm block to be shared between 8 channels each channel takes rate up to 8 Gbps with latency reduction of 47% and power reduction of 27% relative to using two serial channels in parallel. The 16 channel RS (255, 239) decoder has been implemented by 0.13μm CMOS IBM standard cells with a gate count of 200K and area of 20mm², simulation results show this approach can work successfully at the data rate 64Gbps.