Patent ID: 8045606

Claim:
A bidirectional equalizer comprising: a first equalizer to eliminate inter-symbol interference present in a data sequence transmitted from a transmitter and to generate a first candidate data sequence; a first time reverse operator to reverse the order of the transmitted data sequence and to generate a reversed data sequence; a second equalizer to eliminate inter-symbol interference present in the reversed data sequence and to generate a second candidate data sequence; a forward Viterbi decoder to receive the first candidate data sequence, and to decode and output the first candidate data sequence for every data symbol using a first minimum path metric calculated by a maximum likelihood (ML); a reverse Viterbi decoder to receive the second candidate data sequence, and to decode and output the second candidate data sequence for every data symbol using a second minimum path metric calculated by the ML; a second time reverse operator to reverse the order of the decoded second candidate data sequence output from the reverse Viterbi decoder and to output the reversed decoded second candidate sequence; and an arbitrator to compare the first minimum path metric with the second minimum path metric, and to selectively output an output of the forward Viterbi decoder or an output of the second time reverse operator according to the comparison result.