A wireless communication device supporting multiple carriers, the multiple carriers comprising at least two component carriers, each component carrier is associated with a configured bandwidth, the apparatus comprising: a receiver; a memory element; a processor coupled to the receiver and to the memory element, the processor configured to determine a size of a soft buffer memory partition of the memory element to be assigned to a first component carrier based on a first configured bandwidth of the first component carrier and a second configured bandwidth of a second component carrier and a total number of soft channel bits, and the processor configured to control the receiver to receive data on the first component carrier and to store data received on the first component carrier in the soft buffer memory partition of the memory element assigned to the first component carrier based on the determined size, wherein the total number of soft channel bits is determined based on any one of the following: a category of the wireless communication device; a first number associated with hybrid automatic retransmit request processes determined based at least in part on duplex mode; a second number associated with hybrid automatic retransmit request processes determined based at least in part on a number of Multiple Input Multiple Output streams; or a maximum number of transport blocks transmittable to the wireless communication device in one transmission time interval. a receiver; a memory element; a processor coupled to the receiver and to the memory element, the processor configured to determine a size of a soft buffer memory partition of the memory element to be assigned to a first component carrier based on a first configured bandwidth of the first component carrier and a second configured bandwidth of a second component carrier and a total number of soft channel bits, and the processor configured to control the receiver to receive data on the first component carrier and to store data received on the first component carrier in the soft buffer memory partition of the memory element assigned to the first component carrier based on the determined size, wherein the total number of soft channel bits is determined based on any one of the following: a category of the wireless communication device; a first number associated with hybrid automatic retransmit request processes determined based at least in part on duplex mode; a second number associated with hybrid automatic retransmit request processes determined based at least in part on a number of Multiple Input Multiple Output streams; or a maximum number of transport blocks transmittable to the wireless communication device in one transmission time interval. a category of the wireless communication device; a first number associated with hybrid automatic retransmit request processes determined based at least in part on duplex mode; a second number associated with hybrid automatic retransmit request processes determined based at least in part on a number of Multiple Input Multiple Output streams; or a maximum number of transport blocks transmittable to the wireless communication device in one transmission time interval.