Cyclic Codes and Reducible Additive Equations

We prove a Weil-Serre type bound on the number of solutions of a class of reducible additive equations over finite fields. Using the trace representation of cyclic codes, this enables us to write a general estimate for the weights of cyclic codes. We extend Wolfmann´s weight bound to a larger classes of cyclic codes. In particular, our result is applicable to any cyclic code over F_p and F_p ² , where p is an arbitrary prime. Examples indicate that our bound performs very well against the Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) bound and that it yields the exact minimum distance in some cases