A tire monitoring method and apparatus is provided to predict tire tread separation for a tire on a wheel of a vehicle. An NMOS transistor and a PMOS transistor are provided on a substrate. An access flap at the top, bottom, or side allows loading and unloading of ties into and from the tote. In another embodiment, the self-verification means may be an optical filter for viewing an area printed with metameric inks. The sampled buffer-fill information is used to calculate a data rate control word for each of the plurality of tributaries, and stuff bit opportunities are serially calculated responsive to the control word. A plurality of convolutional encoding operations which have respective initial encode states that are mutually different from one another are applied in parallel to one of the blocks to produce a respectively corresponding plurality of convolutional encoding results.