A low complexity architecture for the cell search applied to the LTE systems

Cell search is a crucial process in the synchronization procedure for the 3^rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE) system. In this paper, a high-speed, low-complexity and reliable architecture is proposed for both steps of cell search: sector ID and cell ID group detection. For the sector ID detection, two novel methods, sign-bit reduction and wise resource sharing, are proposed. In addition, for the cell ID group detection, we proposed an algorithm based on the Maximum Likelihood Sequence Detection (MLSD) called “sign-bit MLSD”. Simulations show that the proposed methods result in more than 90% reduction in area compared to the state-of-the-art. We designed and synthesized the architecture using a 130nm CMOS technology, resulting in 0.11 mm² core area and estimated power consumption of 1.4mW.