Patent ID: 8621307

Claim:
An apparatus comprising: a soft decision detector configured to receive an input signal representative of an encoded data stream and to produce at least one soft decision output signal representative of the encoded data stream using soft information, wherein the soft decision detector is configured to compare the input signal to a plurality of soft decision thresholds to produce a plurality of soft decision detection signals representing the encoded data stream, each of the soft decision detection signals including a bit stream of binary values; a soft decision FEC decoder configured to decode the encoded data stream represented by the soft decision output signal to produce decoded data; and a decision threshold control unit configured to adjust at least one of the soft decision thresholds in the soft decision detector in response to at least one bit value average and in response to a bit error rate (BER) determined for the decoded data, wherein the at least one bit value average is determined for the at least one of the soft decision thresholds and represents the average number of ones per a sample of bits or the average number of zeros per a sample of bits occurring in the bit stream of the soft decision detection signal detected using the at least one of the soft decision thresholds.