herein is a galois field operation the preferred embodiment of an efficient chien search method in reed solomon decoding of the present invention can be accomplished using a software program therefore in the present invention a plurality of instructions are written using a programming language and are stored in a machine readable recording medium when the instructions are loaded into a processor having a parallel processing instruction set the processor can be used to execute the method of the present invention in the preferred embodiment the method is executed in an x86 processor having a sse2 instruction set however the method can also be executed in a digital signal processor dsp a general purpose processor or a central processing unit cpu having a similar parallel processing instruction set thus implementation of the present invention should not be limited to the preferred embodiment illustrated herein referring to fig3 an efficient chien search method in reed solomon decoding of the present invention includes the following steps in step 31 a location index j is initialized to 0 i e j 0 and the symbol index i is initialized to 0 i e i 0 in step 32 according to equation 3 the error evaluation value u03bb u03b1 i is found in the preferred embodiment p entries of error evaluation values u03bb u03b1 i u02dc u03bb u03b1 i p u2212 1 are calculated in a single operation using the parallel processing instruction set.