High data rates, low-power consumption, and low complexity will be the most important parameters in the design of the nextgeneration mobile terminals. In this paper we are introducing a new paradigm in the design of direct sequence spread spectrum receiver by combining analog and digital signal processing. The main difference with respect to the conventional all-digital receiver design approach is that the proposed mixed analog/digital processing results in a symbol rate sampling rather than

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... high-rate subchip sampling. Analog signal despreading is the key part of the proposed receiver solution, which is based on a five-port device, a passive RF square-law-type device. It is used to perform two important tasks at the same time, namely, the direct conversion and analog despreading. To achieve lower complexity, the proposed receiver uses rectangular instead of pulse-matched despreading at the cost of only a small performance degradation. Also, we propose a new noncoherent pseudonoise (PN) code tracking scheme based on error signal generated through the L1 norm. This results in comparable or even better PN code tracking performance than L2 norm circuitry, using less complex hardware. Further, we explore how this technology can be applied in the design of DS-CDMA RAKE receiver for mobile terminals. Depending on how the pilot signal is multiplexed, we propose two types of RAKE receivers. It is shown that under Rayleigh fading channel such receiver structures offer robustness and high performance, while maintaining the low complexity achievable through the five-port device.