Patent ID: 7409626

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: a forward error correction (FEC) encoder component on the transmit path, and the FEC encoder component having configurable codeword length ‘N’ and redundancy ‘R’ parameters for the FEC encoding of the communication channel into codewords; an interleaver component coupled to the FEC encoder component for interleaving the codewords, and the interleaver component having configurable interleaver block length ‘I’ and interleaver depth ‘M’ parameters; and a processor coupled to the transmit and receive path components including the FEC encoder and interleaver components and the processor configured to characterize a FEC codeword and interleaver solution space in terms of expressions from which targeted portions of the solution space may be identified prior to evaluation of the magnitude of the coefficients of the corresponding nodes thereof for compliance with communication channel performance constraints.