A novel synchronization method for active positioning via DSSS: Achieving low resource usage and latency

This paper presents a new method for timing synchronization in mobile transceivers utilizing direct sequence spread spectrum signaling (DSSS) for target localization. Traditional methods of timing synchronization for DSSS produce variable latency that depends on channel characteristics and configuration. This latency produces bias in range measurements which causes errors in position estimation. Our method produces a fixed-time low-latency synchronization of sub-chip timing precision, via oversampling. Utilizing single bit quantization we are able to use exclusive-OR (XOR) based operations instead of expensive multiply-accumulate (MAC) functions. This reduces the hardware utilization significantly, allowing more logic efficiency. The proposed approach is particularly critical for hardened FP-GAs that have applications in space and extreme environments.