Asynchronous digital correlator and demodulators including a correlator of this type

An asynchronous, digital correlator to correlate a binary reference signal (REF) with a complex signal formed by a first carrier and second carrier (I, Q), modulated by a pseudo-random function and by an M-ary orthogonal encoding, said two carriers being sampled and digitized, said correlator comprising:

• a multiplexer to transmit, alternately, a value (I) of the first carrier, and a value (Q) of the second carrier, with a period equal to half their sampling period;
• a first digital filter adapted to the pseudo-random function (PN), comprising a chain of registers to store L consecutive bits of the reference signal (REF) and a chain of M correlation macro-cells receiving the sequence of multiplexed values of the first carrier and the second carrier (I and Q), each macro-cell computing the value (CPI0,..., CPI15) of a first function, called a partial correlation function, between N bits of the reference signal and N values of the first carrier (I), and then computing the value (CPQ0,..., CPQ15) of a second function, called a partial correlation function, between N bits of the reference signal and N values of the second carrier (Q), N being equal to L/M;
• a second digital filter adapted to at least one of the M-ary encoding codes and having computation means to determine the value of at least one linear combination of the values of the first functions of partial correlation (CPI0,... CPI15);
• and then to determine the value of a linear combination of the values of the second functions of partial correlation (CPQ0,..., CPQ15), the coefficients of the linear combination being unchanged and being equal to .+-.1;
• and having means to demultiplex the values of the two linear combinations (FIi, FQi), and to determine the modulus (Fi) of a vector having, as its components, the values of these two linear combinations (FIi, FQi).