Hardware design issues for a mobile unit for next generation CDMA systems

This paper addresses hardware design issues of a mobile receiver for future generation direct sequence CDMA wireless communication systems. In the design of a mobile unit, xed-point hardware is an attractive alternative because of increased speed, reduced power consumption, and reduced hardware costs. In this paper, we focus on the xed-point implementation of `blind' detection and channel estimation schemes that do not require knowledge of spreading codes of the other users. The error pattern of the `blind' algorithms, wordlength requirements, and the operation count required for implementation of such algorithms are evaluated. Our results show that the blind maximum likelihood channel estimation along with the blind MMSE detection algorithm can achieve approximately ve times improvement in performance over the conventional correlator based receivers. These newer algorithms require slightly higher wordlength but similar computational complexity.