A novel pseudo noise code acquisition combined with the newly proposed adaptive sampling rate and threshold control (ASTC) algorithm is derived for low-power spread-spectrum systems with complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor implementations. Low-power performance can be achieved by reducing the sampling rate of the proposed system while maintaining the system performance. The sampling rate is dynamically updated due to the change of the channel noise level. Under the assumptions that the channel is additive white Gaussian noise slow-fading channel, up to 74.3% reduction in power consumption compared to the conventional fixed-sampling rate and fixed-threshold architecture is demonstrated with insignificant increase of system complexity. The proposed architecture can be applied to the design of low-power and controllable-performance spread-spectrum communication systems.

A programmable pipelined digital differential matched filter (PDMF) implemented for a direct sequence spread spectrum receiver is proposed in this paper. To reduce the power consumption, the PDMF architecture is based on the synchronization combined PN code phase acquisition algorithm. Compared with the conventional PN code phase acquisition algorithm, the theoretical analysis result indicates that the PDMF acquires both power efficient and preferable detection. Depending on different applications, programmability allows the PDMF to implement 3-tap, 5-tap, or 11-tap Barker codes with the same hardware but different precisions for each tap coefficient. For short tap Baker codes, the architecture could adopt more precision on each tap coefficient to resist the channel noise. Simulation results also show that there are fewer errors of high sample precision with the same tape.