Alphawave’s CTO, Tony Chan Carusone, continues his technical talks on high-speed communications discussing the dozens of parameters that need to be adjusted to realize the significant performance benefits that come from their co-optimization, in order to achieve modern wireline requirements. Analog front end response, forward error correction, and transmitter equalization all need to be designed with the SerDes DSP in mind as a whole. There are three performance metrics for optimizing equalizers, and logic behind them and the problems with relying on assumptions and convention to meet these metrics are reviewed.