Patent ID: 7379610

Claim:
A method of producing a second binary codeword from a first binary codeword comprising a plurality of soft decisions and destined for decoding using a Hadamard transform, the method comprising selecting soft decisions from the first binary codeword into one or more groups and combining the soft decisions within each group to produce a number of resultant soft decisions forming the second binary codeword, wherein the soft decisions selected for each group are those soft decisions that would appear as a consecutive group in the first codeword if the first codeword were permuted by, for each soft decision in the first codeword, taking a position of said soft decision in the first codeword as a decimal number and converting said decimal number into a binary number, bit reversing the binary number, and converting the bit reversed binary number into a decimal number giving the position of said soft decision in the permuted version of the first codeword.