ETS stands for European Telecommunications Standard.

This page provides an overview of the hardware design of a Reed-Solomon (RS) encoder and decoder compliant to the European Telecommunications Standard ETS 300 421:1994.

The encoder receives 188 bytes of data (the “message”) in a byte-serial fashion and adds 16 redundant bytes to form a packet (a “codeword”) of 204 bytes.  The codeword is transmitted through a noisy channel to the decoder.  The decoder receives a 204 byte word and corrects up to 8 bytes in error.  If the decoder detects that it has received a word with more than 8 bytes in error, it will set the transport error indicator bit (“TEI bit”) in the second byte of the outgoing packet and output the data as it was received without attempting to correct it.