Patent ID: 7596172

Claim:
A rake receiver of a mobile communication system, the rake receiver comprising: a plurality of fingers for independently demodulating multipath signals when a signal is received through multiple paths; a searcher for checking intensity levels of received signals, detecting valid paths through which signals having intensity levels above a predetermined level are received, and outputting information about the valid paths; and a controller for selecting and enabling initially allocated fingers corresponding to the valid paths and transmitting signals received through corresponding paths to the enabled fingers in accordance with the information about the valid paths output from the searcher, and when information about at least one new valid path is received from the searcher, selecting and enabling newly allocated fingers corresponding to the new valid paths and simultaneously providing PN position information; wherein the controller selects one of the enabled fingers among the initially allocated fingers as a reference finger and reads out the PN position information from the reference finger and outputs the read PN position information from the reference finger to the newly allocated fingers.