ICARE, VICASSO, ACCELAN, MUSYCA: an innovative family of DSSS/CDMA ASICs for implementing DSSS/CDMA transceivers

The direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) modulation technique has been widely used for a number of years. For point-to-point applications, LETI has proposed the concept of a matched filter receiver able to take into account all the propagation path signals implementing a diversity combining method. The proven interest, in different kinds of environments, of this original architecture had led to the development of a family of flexible ASICs. First this paper describes two ASICs (ICARE and VICASSO), developed in 1999. Then, special attention will be given to the implementation of an asynchronous code division multiple access (CDMA) receiver. The advanced CDMA architecture developed is based on co-channel interference cancellation (IC) schemes, which meanwhile have better performance than conventional detectors and are particularly attractive for hardware implementation. Finally, this article will focus on a synchronous CDMA receiver architecture.