VICASSO: a new flexible base-band transceiver ASIC for a wide range of DSSS communication applications
Dominique Noguet, J.R. Lequepeys, R. Lionti, Norbert Daniele · 2002
Direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) modulations have been widely used in different application fields over the past few years. Their main assets are now well known : reliability, robustness, communication privacy. The main drawback is a low spectrum efficiency due to spectrum spreading. This paper addresses a new base-band transceiver dedicated to point to point DSSS communications. This ASIC called VICASSO (Versatile Integrated Circuit for Advanced Spread Spectrum mOdulations) can be configured in many ways to suit a broad range of applications. First, in order to improve spectrum efficiency, M-ary orthogonal keying (MOK) and multi codes (MC) techniques have been implemented. Then, to face out inter symbol interference (ISI), a code hopping (CH) technique has been used. Many configurations mixing these modulations are available leading to a very flexible approach. VICASSO enables the end user to choose the best trade-off between data rate, robustness and spectrum efficiency for a given application. The functional description of the ASIC, its hardware features and its performance are detailed in this paper.