Patent ID: 7330505

Claim:
An equaliser for a digital communications system, the equaliser comprising: a first buffer to store received data prior to equalisation; a second buffer to store error-checked received data; a channel estimator coupled to said first and second buffers to determine a channel estimate using said received data from said first buffer and said error-checked data from said second buffer; and a control unit coupled to said channel estimator to update the channel estimate for use by said equaliser in equalising said received data, wherein said control unit is configured to perform said updating conditional upon a difference between the channel estimate and a previous channel estimate used for equalising said received data; and a look-up table coupled to said control unit and a calculating device coupled to said look-up table and configured to calculate and store in said look-up table, data for a plurality of symbol sequences, the data for each symbol sequence comprising data obtained by applying said channel estimate to a sequence of symbols.