Patent ID: 8832532

Claim:
An apparatus comprising an iterative decoder adapted to perform one or more global iterations of decoding to recover a valid codeword from a received signal, the iterative decoder comprising: a channel detector adapted to perform, for each global iteration, channel detection on the received signal to generate a set of channel soft-output values, wherein each soft-output value corresponds to a different bit of the valid codeword; an error-correction decoder adapted to perform, for each global iteration: (i) a first local iteration of error-correction decoding on the set of channel soft-output values to generate a set of updated soft-output values; and (ii) one or more subsequent local iterations of error-correction decoding, wherein the error-correction decoder performs, for each subsequent local iteration of error-correction decoding, decoding on a set of updated soft-output values generated by the error-correction decoder during a previous local iteration of error-correction decoding to modify the set of updated soft-output values; and a controller adapted to dynamically control how many subsequent local iterations the error-correction decoder performs when the error-correction decoder does not generate the valid codeword.