Error correction decoder comprising an erasure correcting Reed-Solomon decoder and a CRC decoder

摘要

An error correction decoder (112) for decoding data of a hard drive, tape drive or the like which is protected by a product code (202) of an inner CRC and an outer Reed-Solomon code. The error correction decoder comprises a Reed-Solomon decoder (400) including as many cells (402) as redundancy symbols (206) in a Reed-Solomon codeword (210). In a syndrome generation step (600), each cell generates a partial syndrome. In a error value determination step (800), each cell generates a partial error value based on a line of the inverse of an error location matrix obtained from error locations detected by the CRC. Each cell processes in parallel data from a plurality of Reed-Solomon codewords. <IMAGE>