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 0.18 mu m 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.