Joint DFE and VTD with slice prediction for ATSC DTV receivers

A joint decision feedback equalizer (DFE) and variable trace-back depth trellis decoding (VTD) scheme (VTD-DFE) is proposed for the ATSC DTV receivers. Compared with previous arts, error propagation can be further decreased by adopting a trellis decoder with a variable trace-back depth (TBD) for the decision device in the DFE. Convergence is also greatly speeded by using a slice error detector, which performs slice prediction according to the corresponding confidence value of the decision symbol provided by TCM decoding. Simulation results show that the proposed VTD-DFE leads to an improvement of convergence performance in terms of both the convergence speed and the stability, especially when SNR is low