Fractionally spaced equalizers

Modern digital transmission systems commonly use an adaptive equalizer as a key part of the receiver. The design of this equalizer is important since it determines the maximum quality attainable from the system, and represents a high fraction of the computation used to implement the demodulator. Analytical results offer a new way of looking at fractionally spaced equalizers and have some surprising practical implications. This article describes the data communications problem, the rationale for introducing fractionally spaced equalizers, new results, and their implications. We then apply those results to actual transmission channels.