Patent ID: 7231575

Claim:
Art apparatus comprising: a binary receiver to convert an optical signal to an electrical signal, the electrical signal having a set of information symbols and a set of redundancy symbols, the set of redundancy symbols generated by different forward error correction (FEC) encoding schemes; and a first plurality of hard-decision decoders coupled with the binary receiver and the hard-decision decoders coupled together, each of the hard-decision decoders to iteratively decode the set of information symbols with the set of redundancy symbols in accordance with the different FEC encoding schemes, wherein the plurality of decoders are to decode the symbols in accordance with the different FEC encoding schemes in parallel, and wherein a hard-decision decoder of the plurality comprises: a first syndrome computation unit to compute a first syndrome for a first code class of a set of hard-input data that has been optically received; a second syndrome computation unit to compute a second syndrome for a second code class of the set, wherein the second code class is different than the first code class; and a first error pattern computation unit coupled with the first syndrome computation unit and with the second syndrome computation unit, the first error pattern computation unit to receive the first syndrome, to compute a first error pattern and a first back annotation, and to provide the first back annotation to the second syndrome computation unit.