Comparison of FPGA and Microcontroller Implementations of an Innovative Method for Error Magnitude Evaluation in Reed–Solomon Codes

Abstract

Reed–Solomon (RS) codes are one of the most used solutions for error correction logic in data communications. RS decoders are composed of several blocks: among them, many efforts have been made to optimize the error magnitude evaluation module. This paper aims to assess the performance of an innovative algorithm introduced in the literature by Lu et al. under different systems configurations and hardware platforms. Several configurations of the encoded message chosen between those typically used in different applications have been designed to be run on an FPGA (field programmable gate array) device and an MCU (microcontroller unit). The performances have been evaluated in terms of resource usage and output delay for the FPGA and in terms of code execution time for the MCU. As a benchmark in the analysis, the well-established Forney’s method is exploited: it has been implemented in the same configurations and on the same hardware platforms for a proper comparison. The results show that the theoretical finding are fully confirmed only in the MCU implementation, while on FPGA, the choice of one method with respect to the other depends on the optimization feature (i.e., time or area) that has been decided as a preference in the specific application.