Wireless Pers Commun DOI 10.1007/s11277-007-9286-z Simulation, implementation and performance evaluation of a diversity enabled WCDMA mobile terminal Jean-François Frigon · Ahmed M. Eltawil · Babak Daneshrad · Eugene Grayver · Yuan Li · Gennady Poberezhskiy Received: 26 July 2006 / Accepted: 15 February 2007 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007 Abstract Smart antenna array technology has been shown to greatly improve the perfor- mance of wireless communication systems. In this article, we describe the impact of smart antenna array processing at the mobile terminal for Wide- band Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) J.-F. Frigon (B ) Electrical Engineering Department, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada e-mail: j-f.frigon@polymtl.ca A. M. Eltawil Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California – Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA e-mail: aeltawil@uci.edu B. Daneshrad Electrical Engineering Department, University of California – Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA e-mail: babak@ee.ucla.edu E. Grayver Aerospace Corporation, Los Angeles, CA, USA e-mail: eugene.grayver@aero.org Y. Li Texas Instruments, San Diego Design Center, San Diego, CA, USA e-mail: liyuan@ti.com G. Poberezhskiy Raytheon Company, Waltham, MA, USA e-mail: gennady@raytheon.com cellular networks. Using system simulations we demonstrate the quality of service, network cover- age, and network capacity improvement provided by a WCDMA dual antenna receiver and we estab- lish a relationship between this improvement and the link level performance. We then describe a receiver architecture for a dual antenna WCDMA mobile receiver. The proposed receiver was implemented, as part of a complete mobile terminal solution, in an ASIC using a 0.18 μm, 1.8 V CMOS technology. The ASIC was integrated with RF, ana- log and digital components in a PCMCIA card form factor. The PCMCIA is a 3GPP compliant user equipment and has been submitted to stan- dardized performance and conformance tests. Experimental measurements gathered with the PCMCIA card illustrate the impact of a diversity enabled mobile data terminal on the link level per- formance. For various propagation environments and transmission data rates, improvements in the range of 2.7 – 10 dB in the required DPCH I c /I or for a 1% Block Error Rate (BLER) were ob- served. These measurements are within 1.4 dB of the ideal link level simulations which indicates that the predicted improvement at the network level should also materialize. The results presented in this paper show the tremendous potential of smart antenna arrays in 3G WCDMA cellular networks and establish diversity as a viable solution for high- speed cellular communications.