Trading system performance for energy use in a VLSI implementation of an adaptive equalizer

We simulate a 64Mbps (16Mbaud, 16-PSK) digital communication link operating in a multipath channel. An adaptive equalizer using Least Mean Square algorithm for coefficient update is used to cancel Intersymbol Interference in the receiver. It is shown through computer simulations that system performance can be traded for energy use more intelligently if information about data temporal characteristics is available to the receiver. A simple transversal filter architecture is also presented in which the number of filter taps, and various word sizes can be dynamically adjusted based on temporal characteristics of data.