Patent ID: 7570690

Claim:
An adaptive equalizer comprising: an equalizer filter which outputs a masked equalizer output signal and an unmasked equalizer output signal; an equalizer tap update unit which generates equalizer filter tap coefficients which are fed to a first input of the equalizer filter; a vector norm square estimator in communication with the equalizer tap update unit and the equalizer filter; a switch which selects one of the masked or unmasked equalizer output signals to generate an error signal to be used by the equalizer tap update unit to generate the equalizer filter tap coefficients; and an active taps mask generator which generates an active taps mask which is fed to a second input of the equalizer filter, wherein a dynamic mask vector is used to mask active taps generated by the equalizer tap update unit when the unmasked equalizer output signal is used to generate the error signal, and a fixed mask vector is used to mask active taps generated by the equalizer tap update unit when the masked equalizer output signal is used to generate the error signal.