A two-stage Reed-Solomon decoder for coded 2/sup m/-QAM systems

A two-stage Reed-Solomon (RS) decoder for coded 2/sup m/-ary QAM systems is presented. This two-stage RS decoder consists of a modified step-by-step decoding algorithm as first-stage and a direct solution algorithm as second-stage. The computation complexity is reduced by a factor of (2/sup m/-1)/4, compared with the conventional step-by-step RS decoder.