Patent ID: 8773304

Claim:
A method, comprising: maintaining a plurality of estimates of states of an encoder for one or more instances of a time counter; detecting a signal comprising a plurality of data bits corresponding to an instance of the time counter of the one or more instances of the time counter; determining at least one augmented state for each estimate of the plurality of estimates for the instance of the time counter; predicting a corresponding augmented state for each of the at least one augmented state for successive instances of the time counter based on the at least one augmented state; computing in an integrated circuit apparatus an augmented branch metric for each of the at least one augmented state by augmenting a branch metric for each of the at least one augmented state with corresponding branch metrics for corresponding augmented states; updating a path metric for each of the estimates of the states of the encoder based on the augmented branch metric for each of the at least one augmented state; and determining a time counter value based on the path metric for each of the estimates of the states of the encoder.