Precursor ISI Cancellation Sliding-Block DFE for High-Speed Wireline Receivers

This article introduces a cascaded sliding-block decision feedback equalizer (SB-DFE) that equalizes multiple precursor and postcursor intersymbol interference (ISI). The paper also presents an enhanced statistical analysis for the DFE in the presence of residual ISI and additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), along with generalized expressions for the probability and expected length of DFE burst errors. In addition, the statistical analysis is extended to the conventional SB-DFE and our proposed cascaded SB-DFE to accurately estimate their equalization capability, latency, and steady-state bit error rate (BER). The simulation results reveal that the cascaded SB-DFE provides as low BER as the mininum mean-squared error - DFE (MMSE-DFE) with substantially lower latency and hardware overhead.