Patent ID: 7224743

Claim:
A method for decoding data encoded as trellis-code modulation (TCM) symbols, the method comprising the steps of: receiving the TCM symbols including digital data for a received signal constellation point as one or more pairs of in-phase (I) and quadrature (Q) values; calculating soft decision values, each of the soft decision values corresponding to each respective received pair of (I,Q) values that defines a set of n least significant bits of received data, where n is the number of bits of data that were subject to convolutional encoding in the TCM encoding process; calculating multiple branch metric values for use in the decoding process, from the soft decision values; Viterbi decoding said n least significant bits of data at a time using the multiple branch metric values, and producing n bits at a time of output data; re-encoding the n bits at a time of output data to determine the coset membership of the received TCM symbols; using the re-encoded data to process unencoded data bits in a hard decision process to recover multiple uncoded bits of received data; and assembling the recovered uncoded bits of received data with the n bits of decoded data output from the Viterbi decoding step, to provide a complete data symbol; and wherein the Viterbi decoding step employs a full rate trellis, without de-puncturing.