An Efficient Hardware M-Algorithm Micro-Architecture

A system and techniques for decoding a message received over a communication channel comprises a receiver for receiving an encoded message. A sorting module is configured to organize candidate messages into a number of bins, sort the candidate messages within each bin, and output a group of candidate messages, the group comprising a number of most likely candidate messages from each message bin. A traceback module is configured to receive the most likely candidate message, and to walk through the tree of candidate messages to generate a decoded message.