1. A communications peripheral adapted to transfer data received from a first system to a second system, the communications peripheral comprising: a local interface to the second system; a remote interface to the first system; a codec coupled to the remote interface, wherein the codec is adapted to convert an analog representation of a first data from the first system to a first digital data; a shared memory adapted to temporarily store the first digital data retrieved by the host processor; a Viterbi Accelerator adapted to retrieve the first digital data from the shared memory, the Viterbi Accelerator further adapted to decode the first digital data to a second digital data by application of a Viterbi algorithm, the Viterbi Accelerator further adapted to store the second digital data in the shared memory; and a host processor coupled to the codec and to the shared memory, wherein the host processor is configured to retrieve the first digital data from the codec and to move the first digital data to the shared memory, where the host processor is further configured to retrieve the second digital data from the shared memory and to provide the second digital data to the second system via the local interface.