Patent ID: 7203464

Claim:
A method of processing an incident signal within a “RAKE” receiver with several fingers, comprising: receiving the incident signal formed from symbols output from at least one multi-path transmission channel for which each path transports a delayed version of the signal; detecting paths for allocation to at least some of the fingers; combining the information output from each finger assigned to a path within a memory capable of storing a number of symbols larger than the maximum delay between the paths and which can be addressed by address pointers associated with the corresponding fingers including defined first and last fingers, the combination step including: pointing address pointers in a steady state phase to addresses with mutual spacings taking account of mutual delays in the number of symbols between the paths; storing a current symbol received on the first finger in the memory at the write address denoted by its corresponding address pointer; incrementing the address pointer; and before reception of the next symbol on this first finger, extracting the contents of the memory stored at the read addresses denoted by all the other address pointers in sequence, summing these contents in sequence with the symbols present on the other fingers, then storing these sums, except for the sum corresponding to the last finger, at the same read addresses before incrementing all the other pointers, and delivering the last sum corresponding to the last finger at the output from the receiver.