Design of 1.5 bit quantization correlator in satellite navigation software receiver

Currently, 1 bit or 2 bit signal quantization is widely used in satellite navigation software receivers. The bit-wise parallel algorithm has been proposed for 1 bit and 2 bit signal quantization, which performs correlation with high efficiency. In order to improve the performance of the correlator, this paper proposes a new 1.5 bit quantization method. Theoretical analyses are made from the aspects of complexity and quantization loss, and performance comparison between 1.5 bit quantization correlator and traditional correlators is discussed. The results show that the 1.5 bit quantization algorithm can save about 30 percent complexity under similar quantization loss, reduce more than 0.5 dB signal noise ratio (SNR) loss under similar complexity. It shows great performance improvement for correlators of satellite navigation software receivers.