GPS receiver with efficient signal acquisition

摘要

A direct sequence spread spectrum receiver samples an incoming signal and translates the signal to an IF signal. The IF signal is sampled and stored in memory. In one embodiment, the memory consists of two memory banks which alternately receive sample segments. During a write period to one of the memory banks, the other memory bank supplies its output to a processor. This continues in a ping-pong manner. In another embodiment, a single memory bank is filled and read as necessary, the receiver ignoring incoming signal until the processor has completed processing the sample available at the output of the memory. Such a receiver is useful in global positioning satellite (GPS) signal processing where the incoming signal contains several satellite transmissions encoded with CDMA encoding.