A system and method of using recursive cyclic redundancy check (CRC)+forward error correction (FEC) for enhancing the channel coding gain for a DVB-H receiver, and using a physical (PHY) Reed-Solomon (RS) decoder+FEC to achieve better coding gain. The system and method utilize a dual mode RS decoder (erasure mode and error mode) for FEC decoding. The PHY RS is used to provide smaller granularity for FEC. The system includes a cache memory management scheme for implementing the recursive CRC/RS+FEC in very large scale integrated circuit chip (VLSI) hardware.