A high data rate, low power all-digital correlation circuit design

Correlation techniques are widely used in analog and digital signal processing; e.g. in optiman receiver design. In this paper, a new digital output correlator circuit design is proposed. The correlation results are presented as a binary count of the number of bits in agreement between 31-bit reference and input sequences. Correlation results could be presented at data rates up to about 50MHz. The proposed new circuit could be implemented in a high speed bipolar transistor technology as a monolithic large-scale-integrated circuit with a power dissipation of about .5 watts. A novel pipelined 31-bit digital summing circuit will be presented that employs new multivalued, multithresholded latching and counting circuits in the formation of its binary-coded output. Comparisons with an all-binary digital correlator circuit are made.