Crosstalk interference is the limiting factor in transmission over copper lines. Crosstalk cancelation techniques show great potential for enabling the next leap in DSL transmission rates. An important issue when implementing crosstalk cancelation techniques in hardware is the effect of finite world length on performance. In this paper we provide an analysis of the performance of linear zero-forcing precoders, used for crosstalk compensation, in the presence of finite word length errors. We quantify analytically the trade off between precoder word length and transmission rate degradation. More specifically, we prove a simple formula for the transmission rate loss as a function of the number of bits used for precoding, the signal to noise ratio, and the standard line parameters. We demonstrate, through simulations on real lines, the accuracy of our estimates. Moreover, our results are stable in the presence of channel estimation errors. Finally, we show how to use these estimates as a design tool for DSL linear crosstalk precoders. For example, we show that for standard VDSL2 precoded systems, 14 bits representation of the precoder entries results in capacity loss below 1% for lines over 300m.

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