METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR PERFORMING A PARALLEL SPECULATIVE HUFFMAN DECODING USING BOTH PARTIAL AND FULL DECODERS

A parallel speculative decoder is described. The decoder includes a set of partial decoders and an additional decoder. The partial decoders are aligned at different positions of a portion of an input data stream and speculatively and simultaneously decode symbols (e.g., codewords) having less bits than a longest symbol length. The additional decoder decodes symbols in the event the first partial decoder does not produce valid decoding results.