SIMPLIFIED NONLINEAR EQUALIZERS

Nonlinear equalization was previously shown to be beneficial for recor ding channels with nonlinearities and signal-dependent noise. In this work, we study two types of simplified nonlinear filter architectures that are suitable for VLSI implementation. The performance loss due to the simplifications are not significant in most cases, compared to th e signal-to-noise ratio gain achieved by nonlinear equalization. In on e form of simplification the need for full multiplications is eliminat ed and in the other the number of multiplications in the original nonl inear filter architecture is reduced significantly. Work on experiment al and simulated data are presented.