Patent ID: 8605380

Claim:
A method for selecting which tap coefficients of a programmable finite-impulse-response (FIR) equalizer to fix, the method comprising: performing an initial calibration to determine an initial value for each tap coefficient of a FIR equalizer; determining a “total” FIR equalizer where the tap coefficients are set to their initial values; determining a plurality of sets of tap coefficients that may potentially be fixed in the FIR equalizer; for each set of tap coefficients that may potentially be fixed, determining a “fixed” FIR equalizer where the tap coefficients in the set are set to their initial values and other tap coefficients are set to zero; for each set of tap coefficients that may potentially be fixed, determining a phase-difference energy between the “total” FIR equalizer and the “fixed” FIR equalizer; and fixing the set of tap coefficients associated with the lowest phase-difference energy.