US Patent 7849377 SISO decoder with sub-block processing and sub-block based stopping criterion

The present invention relates to SISO decoder for iteratively decoding a block of received information symbols (r), in particular for use in a turbo decoder, said block being divided into a number of windows of information symbols. In order to achieve a significant reduction of power consumption a SISO decoder is proposed comprising at least one SISO decoding unit (17, 21) for SISO decoding of the received information symbols (r) of a window, wherein a stopping criterion is applied to each window. This allows to abort iterative decoding for each window individually once convergence of decoding is determined by marking a window or sub-block inactive (17,23). An inactive window is no longer SISO decoded in subsequent iterations.