Hardware Design of a Multi-User DS-CDMA Processor for Power-Line Communications

Earlier articles show that DS-CDMA is well suited for power-line communication purposes, e.g. [I]. But this technique has one crucial disadvantage. The hardware implementation of a spread spectrum receiver is of high complexity. Therefore, only some CDMA transceiver chips exist on the market. They all have in common that they do not offer a Rake-receiver structure. In a multipath environment such a receiver will improve the bit error rate substantially. Because power-line channels have to be regarded as multipath channels, this paper describes the hardware design of a direct sequence spread spectrum transceiver for simultaneous multi-user reception. The processor supports up to eight independent transmitter and receiver channels. The implemented Rake-receiver can resolve up to eight different propagation paths and therefore reduces the bit error probability.