Patent ID: 7546042

Claim:
A method of determining a value of a current bit in an optical data stream, the method comprising: receiving an analog electrical signal derived from the optical data stream having known characteristics; normalizing the analog electrical signal; configuring a first analog equalizer based at least in part on a first signal parameter associated with the known characteristics, and a second analog equalizer based at least in part on a second signal parameter associated with the known characteristics; separately providing the normalized electrical signal to the first equalizer and to the second equalizer; filtering the normalized electrical signal using the first equalizer to create a first filtered signal, and filtering the normalized electrical signal using the second equalizer to create a second filtered signal, the first filtered signal and the second filtered signal provided to both a first multiplexer that selects either the first filtered signal or the second filtered signal using a first selection signal and a second multiplexer having a separate second selection signal to select from the first and second filtered signals; measuring a first error rate based at least in part on the first filtered signal, and a second error rate based at least in part on the second filtered signal using an output of the second multiplexer; selecting a filtered signal, from among the first filtered signal and the second filtered signal using, based at least in part on the first error rate and the second error rate; and comparing the selected filtered signal at an output of the first multiplexer to a threshold value to generate the value for the current bit.