Electrical Engineering/Communications/Information Theory "The Berlekamp article alone will make this book worth having." --David Forney, Vice President, Motorola Codex Reed-Solomon Codes and Their Applications Edited by Stephen B. Wicker, Georgia Institute of Technology and Vijay K. Bhargava, University of Victoria On the Voyager spacecraft, they were responsible for sending clear pictures of the planets back to earth. They have also played a key role in the digital audio revolution. They are Reed-Solomon error codes: the extremely powerful codes that provide critical error control for many different types of digital communications systems. This outstanding collection of thirteen original articles written by leading researchers in the field provides a uniquely comprehensive overview of the history and practical applications--some never before published--of these important codes. Key features include:

Preface; An Introduction to Reed-Solomon Codes - S. Wicker and V. Bhargava; Reed-Solomon Codes: A Historical Overview - I. Reed and G. Solomon; Reed-Solomon Codes and the Exploration of the Solar System - R. McEliece and L. Swanson; Reed-Solomon Codes and the Compact Disc - K. Immink; Algorithms and Architectures for the Design of a VLSI Reed-Solomon Codes - A. Hasan, et al; Soft Decision Deconding of Reed-Solomon Codes - A. Cooper, III; Reed-Solomon Codes in Hybrid Automatic Repeat-Request Protocols - S. Wicker and M. Bartz; Reed-Solomon Codes in Frequency-Hop Communications - M. Pursley; Reed-Solomon Codes and the Design of Sequences for Spread-Spectrum Multiple-Access Communications - D. Sarwate; A Hypersystolic Reed-Solomon Decoder - E. Berlekamp, et al; Matching Viterbi Decoders and Reed-Solomon Decoders in a Concatenated System - J. Hagenauer, et al; RS-Based Unidirectional Byte Error-Control Codes Perform Better Than RS Codes - Y. Saitoh and H. Imai; Reed-Solomon and Algebraic Geometry Codes - T. Yaghoobian and I. Blake; Index; Editors' Biographies.