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Power consumption requires critical consideration during system design for portable wireless communication devices as it has a direct influence on the battery weight and volume required for operation. Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (W-CDMA) techniques are favoured for use in future generation mobile communication systems. This thesis investigates novel low power techniques for use in system blocks within a W-CDMA adaptive linear minimum mean squared error (LMMSE) receiver architecture. Two low power techniques are presented for reducing power dissipation in the LMS adaptive filter, this being the main power consuming block within this receiver. These low power techniques are namely the decorrelating transform, this is a differential coefficient technique, and the variable length update algorithm which is a dynamic tap-length optimisation technique. The decorrelating transform is based on the principle of reducing the wordlength of filter coefficients by using the computed difference between adjacent coefficients in calculation of the filter output. The effect of reducing the wordlength of filter coefficients being presented to multipliers in the filter is a reduction in switching activity within the multiplier thus reducing power consumed. In the case of the LMS adaptive filter, with coefficients being continuously updated, the decorrelating transform is applied to these calculated coefficients with minimal hardware or computational overhead. The correlation between filter coefficients is exploited to achieve a wordlength reduction from 16 bits down to 10 bits in the FIR filter block. The variable length update algorithm is based on the principle of optimising the number of operational filter taps in the LMS adaptive filter according to operating conditions. The number of taps in operation can be increased or decreased dynamically according to the mean squared error at the output of the filter. This algorithm is used to exploit the fact that when the SNR in the channel is low the minimum mean squared error of the short equaliser is almost the same as that of the longer equaliser. Therefore, minimising the length of the equaliser will not result in poorer MSE performance and there is no disadvantage in having fewer taps in operation. If fewer taps are in operation then switching will not only be reduced in the arithmetic blocks but also in the memory blocks required by the LMS algorithm and FIR filter process. This reduces the power consumed by both these computation intensive functional blocks. Power results are obtained for equaliser lengths from 73 to 16 taps and for operation with varying input SNR. This thesis then proposes that the variable length LMS adaptive filter is applied in the adaptive LMMSE receiver to create a low power implementation. Power consumption in the receiver is reduced by the dynamic optimisation of the LMS receiver coefficient calculation. A considerable power saving is seen to be achieved when moving from a fixed length LMS implementation to the variable length design. All design architectures are coded in Verilog hardware description language at register transfer level (RTL). Once functional specification of the design is verified, synthesis is carried out using either Synopsys DesignCompiler or Cadence BuildGates to create a gate level netlist. Power consumption results are determined at the gate level and estimated using the Synopsys DesignPower tool.

Wireless radio access technologies have been progressively evolving to meet the high data rate demands of consumers. The deployment and success of voice-based second generation networks were enabled through the use of the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and the Interim Standard Code Division Multiple Access (lS-95 CDMA) networks. The rise of the high data rate third generation communication systems is realised by two potential wireless radio access networks, the Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) and the CDMA2000. These networks are based on the use of various types of codes to initiate, sustain and terminate the communication links. Moreover, different codes are used to separate the transmitting base stations. This dissertation focuses on base station identification aspects of the Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) WCDMA networks. Notwithstanding the ease of deployment of these networks, their asynchronous nature presents serious challenges to the designer of the receiver. One of the challenges is the identification of the base station identity by the receiver, a process called Cell Search. The receiver algorithms must therefore be robust to the hostile radio channel conditions, Doppler frequency shifts and the detrimental effects of carrier frequency offsets. The dissertation begins by discussing the structure and the generation of WCDMA base station data along with an examination of the effects of the carrier frequency offset. The various cell searching algorithms proposed in the literature are then discussed and a new algorithm that exploits the correlation length structure is proposed and the simulation results are presented. Another design challenge presented by WCDMA networks is the estimation of carrier frequency offset at the receiver. Carrier frequency offsets arise due to crystal oscillator inaccuracies at the receiver and their effect is realised when the voltage controlled oscillator at the receiver is not oscillating at the same carrier frequency as that of the transmitter. This leads to a decrease in the receiver acquisition performance. The carrier frequency offset has to be estimated and corrected before the decoding process can commence. There are different approaches in the literature to estimate and correct these offsets. The final part of the dissertation investigates the FFT based carrier frequency estimation techniques and presents a new method that reduces the estimation error. / Thesis (M.Sc.Eng.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2006.