ABSTRACT As four‐level pulse‐amplitude‐modulation (PAM‐4) signal becomes widely adopted for high‐speed wireline communication, robust equalization is crucial due to reduced eye‐opening and increased sensitivity to channel loss, compared to PAM‐2. Utilizing analog‐to‐digital converters and digital signal processing with a feed‐forward equalizer (FFE) and a decision‐feedback equalizer (DFE), conventional equalizer adaptation may result in suboptimal bit‐error‐rate (BER) performance. This letter introduces an improved training algorithm to obtain the optimal equalizer configuration (i.e., main tap position in FFE and the DFE tap coefficient). The experimental results demonstrate superior BER performance of the proposed algorithm compared to the conventional approaches.