Patent ID: 8340202

Claim:
A method of decoding a symbol of interest received by a wireless transceiver, the method comprising generating a complex soft symbol value for the symbol of interest, the symbol of interest having a Gray-mapped QAM format, the complex soft symbol value having a real part and an imaginary part, said method comprising: storing a look-up table of pre-computed bit contributions to the complex soft symbol value at a machine-readable memory of the wireless transceiver; generating input bit soft values for the symbol of interest, each input bit soft value being a likelihood estimate for a given bit in the symbol of interest; and calculating the complex soft symbol value for the symbol of interest by: determining a first soft symbol value for the real part of the symbol of interest by indexing into the look-up table as a function of the input bit soft values corresponding to the real part, and determining a second soft symbol value for the imaginary part of the symbol of interest by indexing into the look-up table as a function of the input bit soft values corresponding to the imaginary part; and forming the complex soft symbol value for the symbol of interest by combining the first and second soft symbol values.