ADJUSTING INPUT SAMPLES IN TURBO EQUALIZATION SCHEMES TO BREAK TRAPPING SETS

In one embodiment, a turbo equalizer has a channel detector that receives equalized samples and generates channel soft-output values. An LDPC decoder attempts to decode the channel soft-output values to recover an LDPC-encoded codeword. If the decoder converges on a trapping set, then an adjustment block selects one or more of the equalized samples based on one or more specified conditions and adjusts the selected equalized samples. Selection may be performed by identifying the locations of unsatisfied check nodes of the last local decoder iteration and selecting the equalized samples that correspond to bit nodes of the LDPC-encoded codeword that are connected to the unsatisfied check nodes. Adjustment of the equalized samples may be performed using any combination of scaling, offsetting, and saturation. Channel detection is then performed using the adjusted equalized samples to generate an updated set of channel soft-output values, which are subsequently decoded by the decoder.