Patent ID: 6987803

Claim:
Communications apparatus, comprising: a transmitter, which comprises: a Tomlinson-Harashima precoder, which is coupled to receive and precode a sequence of input symbols, so as to generate a corresponding sequence of precoded symbols; and transmit circuitry, which is adapted to process the precoded symbols so as to generate a signal for transmission over a communication channel; and a receiver, which is coupled to receive the signal over the channel, and which comprises: a feed-forward equalizer (FFE), adapted to apply a feed-forward equalization function to the signal, so as to generate a sequence of equalized samples; a decision block, which is coupled to receive the equalized samples from the FFE and to generate a sequence of decision output samples responsive thereto, the decision block comprising an adaptive filter, having coefficients determined adaptively responsive to a characteristic of the channel, an indication of which coefficients is conveyed by the receiver to the transmitter for implementation in the precoder; and a Tomlinson-Harashima decoder, which is coupled to receive a sequence of input samples comprising at least one of the sequence of decision output samples generated by the decision block and the sequence of equalized samples generated by the FFE, and to decode the input samples in order to reconstruct the sequence of input symbols; wherein the equalized samples do not undergo Tomlinson-Harashima decoding before they are received by the decision block.