Techniques for processing digital signals for a variety of applications, including in a communications (e.g., CDMA) system. A pointer location within a circular buffer is determined by establishing a length of the circular buffer, a start address that is aligned to a power of 2, and an end address located distant from the start address by the length and less than a power of 2 greater than the length. The method and system determine a current pointer location for an address within the circular buffer, a stride value of bits between the start address and the end address, a new pointer location within the circular buffer that is shifted from the current pointer location by the number of bits of the stride value. An adjusted pointer location is within the circular buffer by an arithmetic operation of the new pointer location with the length.