Patent ID: 7577881

Claim:
A modem having shared and discrete components forming a transmit path and a receive path configured to couple to a communication medium for establishing a communication channel thereon, and the modem comprising: an interleaver component for interleaving the communication channel, and the interleaver component configurable as to interleaver parameters ‘I, D” corresponding to block length and depth respectively; and the interleaver including: a memory for buffering the communication channel; and a controller controlling writing to and reading from the memory of successive data elements of the communication channel with a quantity ‘I’ pairs of write and read pointers with each pair identifying memory locations corresponding with an input and output respectively of an associated one of ‘I’ virtual first-in-first-out (‘v-FIFO’) buffers in the memory; and with control of the pointers required to read out the stored data elements in interleaved fashion, limited to shifting all pointers uniformly by one address block in each interleaver block cycle; thereby simplifying pointer management.