US Patent 7454684 Apparatus and method for turbo decoder termination

An apparatus and method is disclosed for decoding a received sequence of symbols using a decoding process that comprises a plurality of decoder iterations. According to one embodiment of the invention, a method comprises determining whether a pre-determined decoder termination threshold metric has been met; only if the threshold metric has been met, determining whether a decoder termination test based on a cyclic redundancy check code has been passed; and, only if the cyclic redundancy check test has been passed, terminating the decoder iterations.