Patent ID: 8006160

Claim:
A method of representing a sequence of symbol operations in a coding system, implemented as hardware or software, comprising: reading in instructions from an instruction store, wherein the instructions are selected from an instruction set and at least some of the instructions define operations on source symbols used to form output symbols; reading in source symbols from an source symbol store; executing the instructions on the source symbols using a processing unit to generate output symbols, wherein the instructions are independent of the source symbols and the processing unit configuration is independent of the particular instructions used, thereby allowing the processing unit to operate the coding system for different FEC (forward error correction) codes by changing the instructions and not changing the processing unit; wherein the instruction set of a schedule representation comprises generic instructions for performing symbol operations, wherein at least some of the instructions in the instruction set define FEC-specific instructions; and wherein each of a plurality of output symbols is associated with one or more source symbols, wherein the number of source symbols associated with an output symbol being the output symbol's degree, wherein the instruction set of a schedule representation comprises instructions including an instruction for selecting an active source symbol that is associated with an output symbol of degree two or higher and instructions for deactivating the selected source symbol that is associated with the output symbol of degree two or higher.