the present invention provides a system and method of timing estimation for use in a digital , receiver within a communication system . this method exploits the complementary information available from the use of two different nonlinearities to estimate the timing offset following asynchronous sampling of the received signal at a rate of two samples per symbol . the present method operates in a feedforward configuration thereby avoiding issues associated with feedback configurations such as hangup . the present method uses a magnitude square nonlinearity as well as a delay , complex conjugate and multiply nonlinearity to calculate the timing offset . the choice of these nonlinearities is influenced by the need for the estimator to operate in the presence of a phase offset on the received signal . timing estimators which can tolerate the presence of a slowly varying phase offset over the observation interval on the received signal are especially important in all - digital feedforward receiver design . separating the two sample per symbol outputs from the nonlinearities into odd and even samples provides four signals which , when suitably manipulated , yield an expression for the timing estimate . this timing offset is then fed to a timing correction unit which calculates the data samples corresponding to the sampling clock phase and removes the redundant samples . the resultant sampled signal is then forwarded to additional synchronization and functional units in the receiver . the system may be utilized in a variety of digital receivers employing cdma , tdma , fdma and / or any combination of the principles of the above or other technologies .