A new two-step soft-output Viterbi algorithm (SOVA) decoder architecture is presented. A significant reduction in the decoding latency can be achieved through the use of the dual-port RAM in the survivor memory structure of the trace-back unit. The system complexity can be lowered due to the determination of the absolute value of the path metric differences inside the add-compare-select (ACS) unit. The proposed SOVA architecture was verified successfully by the functional simulation of Verilog HDL modeling and the FPGA prototyping. The SOVA decoder achieves a data rate very close to that of the conventional Viterbi Algorithm (VA) decoder and the resource consumption of the realized SOVA decoder is only one and a half times larger than that of the conventional VA decoder.