Abstract
This brief discusses the limitation of previously pub- lished statistical decision feedback equalizer (DFE) models when residual inter-symbol interference (ISI) is present and proposes a method that overcomes this limitation. The paper presents an accurate closed-form expression for the DFE with residual ISI and additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). The analysis is extended to 4-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4) to cover serial links of current interest. The results verify that the proposed model estimates an accurate bit error rate (BER).