Low-Power Adaptive FIR Equalizer Via Soft Error Cancellation

In this paper, we present an adaptive FIR equalizer which reduces power dissipation by employing a new algorithmic error correction technique. Building on the voltage overscaling (VOS) technique, we formulate the statistical estimation of timing errors that may be caused by VOS, called soft errors to detect and cancel them at a system level. We derive a minimum variance unbiased estimator, and develop an adaptive and power-optimized algorithm for an adaptive equalizer. Up to 30% power savings are demonstrated with negligible performance loss for an example, 16-tap minimum mean square error (MMSE) FIR equalizer