Design of a low power mixed-signal RAKE receiver

Rake receiving is a crucial technique in spread spectrum system. Typical rake receivers, implemented all-digitally, entail considerable power consumption. Though generally regarded as a promising low power solution, analog rake receivers have not been widely adopted because of formidable design complexity in integrating the overall analog and digital systems. In this paper, we present a practical scheme to realize a digitally-controlled mixed-signal rake receiver with both software and hardware simulation results demonstrating the efficiency of the proposed system. Synthesis and SPICE simulations using 0.18mum CMOS technology show that the power consumption is less than 2.5 mW while operating at 16 MHz clock rate at 1.5 V supply voltage