Patent attributes
To appropriately express an erasure position of a code by a small-scale, simple-structured circuit, a soft-output decoding circuit (90) in each element decoder includes a received value and a priori probability information selection circuit (154) to select an input to-be-decoded received value TSR and extrinsic information or interleaved data TEXT, whichever is necessary for soft-output decoding. Based on inner erasure position information IERS supplied from an inner erasure information generating circuit (152), the received value and a priori probability information selection circuit (154) replaces a position where no coded output exists due to puncture or the like with a symbol whose likelihood is “0”. That is, the received value and a priori probability information selection circuit (154) outputs information which assures a probability in which a bit corresponding to a position where there is no coded output is “0” or “1” to be “½”.