An in-between layer partial syndrome stopping (IBL-PS) criterion for a layered LDPC decoder. The IBL-PS syndrome is obtained by applying the parity checks (Hr,r+1) of a couple of a first layer (r) and a second layer (r+1) on the variables after the first layer has been processed and before the second layer is processed by the decoder, the decoding being stopped if said in-between layer syndrome (sr,r+1) is satisfied for at least a couple of consecutive layers.