A flexible RAKE receiver architecture for WCDMA mobile terminals

This paper presents a novel RAKE receiver architecture for WCDMA FDD downlink reception in mobile terminals. In contrast to the conventional RAKE finger approach, the proposed FlexRake architecture performs signal reception with a single correlator engine and a buffer which stores the entire delay spread of the baseband I/Q samples. This allows each of the tracked multipaths to be despread sequentially with codes that are exactly in the same phase. The main benefits of the proposed receiver architecture are flexible multipath allocation, symbol-synchronous operation, and straightforward receiver control.