System and method for multi-dimensional decoding

A system comprising:

• a soft decoder to generate a plurality of candidate error corrections to correct one or more data bits having soft bit information, wherein each candidate error correction defines suggested changes to the data bits and is associated with a soft bit value, to map the soft bit values associated the plurality of candidate error corrections to a uniform scale, to order each of the plurality of candidate error corrections to have a combined associated mapped value in a monotonically non-decreasing order, and to soft decode one or more of the plurality of candidate error corrections in the order of the associated mapped values by a decoding operation for each candidate error correction therein with the associated non-mapped soft bit values.

A system to soft decode multi-dimensional encoded data, the system comprising:

• a soft decoder to soft decode a component code including hard bit values and soft bit information in a first dimension of multi-dimensional encoded data to generate a plurality of candidate error corrections, wherein each candidate defines a suggested change to the hard bit values and associated soft bit information for the component code, to select one of the plurality of candidate error corrections according to the associated soft bit information, to update the component code by applying the selected candidate error correction to modify the hard bit values of the component code, to iteratively repeat the steps of soft decoding, selecting and updating in one or more additional dimensions of multi-dimensional encoded data using the updated component code output generated in a dimension of a previous iteration.