Spread spectrum receiver having despreaders commonly shared among rake combiners

A spread spectrum receiver includes multiple despreaders (111-11K) and multiple RAKE combiners (131-13M) associated respectively with spread spectrum signals. Allocation circuitry (121-12M,151-15M,16-19) detects one or more multipath components of received spread spectrum signals respectively addressed to multiple users, and configures the despreaders into a number of groups of despreaders such that the groups correspond to the received spread spectrum signals and each group has one or more despreaders corresponding to the detected one or more multipath components of the received spread spectrum signal, and allocates the despreaders of each group to the corresponding RAKE combiner. All despreaders are provided in number that is smaller than the number of the RAKE combiners times a maximum number of possible multipath components of a spread spectrum signal and greater than the number of the RAKE combiners.