Patent ID: 7310767

Claim:
A method of processing soft information in a block code decoder, comprising: receiving a length n soft input vector; creating a binary vector Y corresponding to the length n soft input vector; hard decoding each linear function X i of Y and a test pattern Z i of one or more test patterns, wherein when the hard decoding is successful a codeword and an associated metric produced by the hard decoding are added to a set S; removing redundant codewords in S to form a reduced set S′ based on processing a number of errors found, during the hard decoding of the linear function X i and a guaranteed error correcting capability t of the block code decoder; and generating n soft outputs based on c estimated soft output values and (n-c) non-estimated soft output values wherein the c estimated soft output values are operable to be computed from one or more positions of the length n soft input vector and one or more codewords in the set S′.