VLSI SINGLE-CHIP (255,223) REED-SOLOMON ENCODER WITH INTERLEAVER

A concatenated coding system consisting of a (255,223) Reed-Solomon outer code and a convolutional inner code is provided with either a block of preinterleaved frames or an interleaver of frames in a block of data symbols to be coded in the outer decoder. By interleaving, errors are constrained to occur in only one symbol in a frame, which can be corrected by the Reed-Solomon outer decoder. After transmission and inner decoding, the data symbols are deinterleaved for outer decoding. Instead of preinterleaving at the source, or interleaving before inner encoding, the frames of data symbols may be interleaved at the receiver after inner decoding and then combined with the inner decoded check symbols for outer decoding. The outer encoder is a bit-serial Reed-Solomon encoder with programmable interleaving, and the inner decoder is a Viterbi decoder.