Tianjin University of Technology and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012 A novel Reed Solomon (RS) block turbo code (BTC) coding scheme of RS(63,58)×RS(63,58) for optical communications is proposed. The simulation results show that the net coding gain (NCG) of this scheme at the sixth iteration is more than that of other coding schemes at the third iteration for the bit error rate (BER) of 10^-12. Furthermore, the novel RS BTC has shorter component code and rapider encoding and decoding speed. Therefore, the novel RS BTC coding scheme can be better used in high-speed long-haul optical communication systems, and the novel RS BTC can be regarded as a candidate code of the super forward error correction (super-FEC) code. Moreover, the encoding/decoding design and implementation of the novel RS BTC are also presented.