An optimized coefficient update processor for high-throughput adaptive equalizers

A processor for the adaptation of the coefficients in high throughput adaptive equalizers is presented. The accumulation operation-fundamental basis of the adaptation process-is split into two steps: A fine-grain carry-save accumulation with time sharing factor 2 collects the products of estimated error and input symbols over a block length of 16 input symbols and operates at twice the symbol rate, a master accumulator with time-sharing factor 32 collects the block-sums from 16 fine-grain accumulators, multiplies them with the adaptation constant and carries out the final vector merging operation, saturation, tap leakage and radix-4 Booth recording. Three steps to reduce the power consumption of the fine-grain accumulators is presented and evaluated for a 14-bit-wide accumulator: The suppression of one state of the redundant codes for the value "1" in the carry save digit alphabet i.e. (0, 1) or (1,0), reduces the power consumption by 5.5%; The redundancy-reduced digit alphabet can be exploited to reduce the transistor count of the following full adder by one third, resulting in a significant input capacity reduction which increases the maximum clock frequency by nearly 15% and achieves further reduction of power consumption of 2.7%. Finally an optimized sign extension logic reduces the capacitive load of the input sign bits by 70%, eliminates six of the full adders in the sign extension slices and increases the power reduction to 19.2%. The maximum clock frequency of the accumulator could be increased by 18% due to the reduced internal lends.