A novel mechanism for sharing filter taps across a plurality of
interference cancellers. Each interference canceller may be directed to
impairment, such as Ethernet impairments, including Ethernet 1000Base-T
impairments. Various interference impairments include echo cancellation,
NEXT cancellation and/or other interference detection or cancellation,
etc. The hardware requirements of the interference impairment cancellers
are reduced by sharing filter taps among the cancellers. In a first
embodiment, the taps from a unified filter tap bank are shared across all
the interference impairment cancellers for all four channels and over all
ports. In a second embodiment, a portion of the taps of each filter are
shared wherein each canceller comprises a fixed filter tap portion and a
shared filter tap portion. A tap allocation algorithm assigns taps to
those cancellers that need them the most. A canceller configuration is
selected that yields maximal interference mitigation and the taps are
allocated accordingly.