Design of optimized fixed-point WCDMA receiver

To satisfy energy and complexity constraints, embedded wireless systems require fixed-point arithmetic implementation. To optimize the fixed-point specification, existing approaches are based on fixed-point simulations to evaluate the performances. In this paper, the approach used to optimize the fixed-point specification for a WCDMA receiver is presented. The dynamic range and the fixed-point accuracy are evaluated analytically in our approach. The analytical accuracy constraint expression according to the bit error rate (BER) is proposed. The results show that the optimized fixed-point specification depends on the input receiver signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).