Reconfigurable low power cell search engine for UMTS-FDD mobile terminals

This paper addresses initial acquisition for the UMTS-FDD W-CDMA standard. It presents an innovative cell searcher architecture optimized for acquisition speed and for low power consumption. The proposed architecture utilizes a memory-based digital matched filter with permuted processing order. The same filtering hardware can be reconfigured to process all the steps of the UMTS-FDD initial cell search. It can also perform other functions such as initial delay profiling, neighboring cell search and idle-mode timing alignment, which are typically carried out by the Rake receiver. These additional capabilities allow for further system-level power reduction since they avoid activating the Rake.