In one aspect, the present disclosure provides an advantageous generalization of a SLIC receiver structure, by allowing multiple solutions to survive at any one or more of the serial stages included in the SLIC receiver. Where any given stage produces multiple solutions, the next stage of the SLIC receiver processes those multiple input solutions to produce multiple output solutions. Consequently, the contemplated SLIC receiver effectively builds a tree structure with as many levels as there are stages in the SLIC receiver. Such operations allow the SLIC receiver to form two or more solution threads spanning the stages, and to make an improved overall demodulation decision for a received symbol vector by selecting the best solution thread. Further, the additional complexity of allowing multiple survivor solutions at one or more SLIC stages is controlled in one or more embodiments, using survivor pruning for example.