Patent ID: 7092432

Claim:
A Node-B/base station receiver comprising: at least one antenna for receiving signals from users; a pool of reconfigurable Rake fingers, each finger for recovering a multipath component of a user, each Rake finger assigned a code of the user, a code phase of the multipath component and an antenna of the at least one antenna; an antenna/Rake finger pool interface for providing each finger of the Rake pool an output of the antenna assigned to that Rake finger; a combiner for combining the recovered multipath components for a user to produce data of the user; and wherein the pool of Rake fingers is on a single application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and as loading of a cell of the Node-B/base station receiver increases, additional ASICs are added, each additional ASIC comprising: a cool of Rake fingers; and software configured to reconfigure the single ASIC and additional ASICs as the loading of the cell increases.