Patent ID: 7656938

Claim:
A feedforward equalizer for equalizing a sequence of signal samples received from a remote transmitter, the feedforward equalizer being included in a receiver having a decoder, the feedforward equalizer comprising: a non-adaptive filter operable to receive the signal samples and to produce a filtered signal; an adaptive noise cancellation element operable to subtract from the filtered signal a noise signal received from a noise computing module of the receiver and to produce a noise-reduced filtered signal; and a gain stage operable to receive the noise-reduced filtered signal and to adjust the gain of the feedforward equalizer by adjusting the amplitude of the noise-reduced filtered signal, the amplitude of the noise-reduced filtered signal being adjusted so as to fit in an operational range of the decoder; wherein the adaptive noise cancellation element is adaptive based on a normalized adaptation error that is determined by dividing a decoder error of the decoder by a gain value of the gun stage.