Patent ID: 8306134

Claim:
A method for making gain change decisions in a high speed receiver environment, comprising the steps of: receiving a digital data signal at the high speed receiver that is downconverted from an analog input signal; processing the digital data signal in parallel, both in a first processing path, using a high resolution time-frequency transform to process a first sample set of the digital data signal, and in a second processing path, using a reduced time-frequency transform to process a second sample set, wherein the second sample set includes fewer samples than the first sample set; processing the second sample set of the digital data signal using the second processing path with the reduced time-frequency transform by comparing a frequency-domain representation of the second sample set with predetermined threshold values; determining, as a result of the comparison of the frequency-domain representation of the second sample set with the predetermined threshold values, whether a requirement exists for gain ranging on the digital data signal, and changing the gain of the analog input signal when the determining step indicates gain ranging is needed before the first processing path has completed its sampling process.