A new low-power and area efficient RAKE receiver design without incurring performance degradation

A new architecture for power and area efficient RAKE receivers for a third generation wireless WCDMA system is presented. The proposed approach based on parallel operations of code generators eliminates de-skew blocks of RAKE receivers and shares several blocks such that compensators, orthogonal variable spreading factor code generators and scrambling code generators are shared among all fingers, which leads to power and area reduction. When the proposed architecture is applied to a RAKE receiver with four fingers, it reduces power dissipation by 55.2% and the area by 38.1% without any system performance degradation.