Patent attributes
A reconfigurable turbo decoder comprising N processing units. Each of the N processing units receives soft input data samples and decodes the received soft input data samples. The N processing units operate independently such that a first processing unit may be selected to decode the received soft input data samples while a second processing unit may be disabled. The number of processing units selected to decode the soft input data samples is determined by a data rate of the received soft input data samples. The reconfigurable turbo decoder also comprises N input data memories that store the received soft input data samples and N extrinsic information memories that store extrinsic information generated by the N processing units. Each of the N processing units is capable of reading from and writing to each of the N input data memories and each of the N extrinsic information memories.
