Patent ID: 7072383

Claim:
A receiver of a spread spectrum communication system comprising: a plurality of despreading circuits for despreading a received signal having multipath components at predetermined timings allocated thereto; a rake circuit for performing rake combining of despread signals output by the plurality of despreading circuits; and a path searcher which forms a first window showing a part of a search range and calculates first delay profile data of said received signal in said first window to search an effective path, forms at least one second window in the search range other than said first window and calculates second delay profile data of said received signal in said second window, and detects timings at which said received signal is to be read based on said calculated first and second delay profile data to allocate the detected timings to said plurality of despreading circuits; wherein said path searcher forms a plurality of second windows including said at least one second window by dividing the search range excent said first window to calculate said second delay profile data in respective second windows of said plurality of second windows in accordance with a predetermined order; and wherein said path searcher is supplied with peak position information from a peak position estimation circuit which performs rough estimation of a peak position of the received signal, and said path searcher sets a center of said first window at a timing at which the peak position appears.