Patent ID: 8861581

Claim:
A receiver for processing a vestigial sideband (VSB) signal, the receiver comprising: a first equalizer/decoder unit that is configured to perform a first equalizing operation, a first Trellis-Coded Modulation (TCM) decoding and a first Reed-Solomon (RS) decoding on a received symbol to output a first dibit; a second equalizer/decoder unit that is configured to perform a second equalizing operation, a second TCM decoding and a second RS decoding on the received symbol to output a transport stream; and a third equalizer/decoder unit disposed between the first and second equalizer/decoder units, wherein the third equalizer/decoder unit is configured to sequentially perform a third equalizing operation on the received symbol, a third TCM decoding which uses the first dibit as a priori information and third RS decoding to generate a third dibit, and wherein the third dibit is srovided to the second equalizer/decoder unit, wherein the first dibit is provided as a priori information for a soft-decision operation of the second TCM decoding.