US Patent 7289047 Decoding variable length codes while using optimal resources

In one aspect, code-words of variable lengths are decoded using a multi-stage decoding approach, with different stages being of different sizes (and thus accepting input data of corresponding number of bits). According to another aspect, the same bit positions are used for storing symbol information and offset value in case of hit and miss results respectively, thereby reducing the width of the entries of the decoding table. According to yet another aspect, conditional processing is avoided by providing a common arithmetic operation when decoding code-words in various escape modes, but using neutral operand values in case the operation is not required.