Patent ID: 7212579

Claim:
A radio telecommunications receiver operative to receive symbols or bits by iterative determination of soft estimates of symbols or bits followed by a hard decision as to what symbol or bit was intended, the receiver comprising: a first processor operative to provide first soft estimates of symbols or bits of the received signal, the first processor being a successive interference cancellation (SIC) multiple input multiple output (MIMO) detector; a second processor operative to decode the first soft estimates and to provide second soft estimates of the symbols or bits; a combiner operative to provide third soft estimates back to the first processor for subsequent further decoding, the third soft estimates of each symbol or bit being dependent upon the respective second soft estimate and a respective previous second soft estimate; a deinterleaver operative to deinterleave the first soft estimates from the SIC MIMO detector before the first soft estimates are passed to the second processor; and an interleaver operative to interleave the third soft estimates provided by the combiner before the third soft estimates are passed back to the SIC MIMO detector.