Single correlator receiver for wideband multipath channel

This paper presents a novel architecture of DS-CDMA digital receiver. Conventional RAKE receivers, used in DS-CDMA systems, utilizes multiple correlators called fingers to despread multipaths of the received signal, where all the multipaths are correlated separately then aligned and combined before a bit decision is made. The proposed DS-CDMA digital receiver uses a single correlator and single code sequence generator to recover the energy in multipaths. Correlator consists of a specialized integrator, which performs correlations of the received sequence chips with the code sequence chips in a single chip time period. Detected multipaths are recovered by taking advantage of time diversity and their orthogonal structure. Finally, Correlator outputs are sent to maximal ratio combiner for a bit decision. The main advantage of the proposed receiver engine is that it requires a single correlator and code generator as compared to the conventional RAKE receiver, which requires multiple correlators and code generators.