Embodiments of the present disclosure provide a high speed low latency rate configurable soft decision and hard decision based pipelined Reed-Solomon (RS) decoder architecture suitable for optical communication and storage. The proposed RS decoder is a configurable RS decoder that is configured to monitor the channel and adjust code parameters based on channel capacity. The proposed RS decoder includes interpolation and factorization free Low-Complexity-Chase (LCC) decoding to implement soft-decision decoder (SDD). The proposed RS decoder generates test vectors and feeds these to a pipelined 2-stage hard decision decoder (HDD). The proposed RS decoder architecture computes error locator polynomial in exactly 2t clock cycles without parallelism and supports high throughput, and further computes error evaluator polynomial in exactly t cycles. The present disclosure provides a 2-stage pipelined decoder to operate at least latency possible and reduced size of delay buffer.