An apparatus and method for a two-stage linear/nonlinear interference cancellation comprising processing a receive signal to produce a first descrambled signal; and processing the first descrambled signal to produce a detected signal. In one aspect, a first interference canceller module is used for processing the received signal and a second interference canceller module is used for processing the first descrambled signal. In one aspect, the first interference canceller is a linear interference canceller (IC) and the second interference canceller is a linear/nonlinear interference canceller (IC).