An alternative investigation has been carried out into the soft-decision pa
rtial parallel interference cancellation (SD-PPIC) detectors proposed by Di
vala ei al. (1998) for DS/CDMA systems. A convenient method is presented fo
r determining the partial cancellation factors in SD-PPIC detectors, which
can ensure that the SD-PPIC detector converges at the maximum rate to its p
erformance limit, which is proven to be equivalent to that of a decorrelati
ng detector.