Patent ID: 8707140

Claim:
A device supporting error correction, comprising: a receiver configured to receive data over a communications link; a decapsulator coupled to the receiver and configured to create datagrams; a decoder coupled to the decapsulator and configured to store the datagrams in a table and to create codewords, the decoder storing the datagrams in table columns to create codewords in table rows; and a user interface coupled to the decoder and configured to render images corresponding with the datagrams on the user interface; wherein the decapsulator is configured to generate at least three levels of erasure attributes associated with the datagrams providing soft erasures which describe a likelihood of a symbol in a codeword being erroneous, and the decoder is configured to store the erasure attributes in an erasure table, and to selectively bypass codewords that the erasure table identifies as correct and codewords having too many errors to correct, and the decapsulator sets soft erasure values for describing the likelihood of a symbol in a codeword being erroneous according to: 0(00), wherein a probability of the symbol's being erroneous is 0; 1(01), wherein the probability of the symbol's being erroneous is less than 0.5; 2(10), wherein the probability of the symbol's being erroneous is more than 0.5; and 3(11), wherein the probability of the symbol's being erroneous is 1.