This paper deals with the presentation of different multi-user detectors in the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) context. The challenge is always to optimize the compromise between performance and complexity. Compared with the solution commonly used today, the rake detector, successive interference cancellation (SIC) detector has better performance despite its higher complexity. Our innovative solution proposes joining detector and channel turbo decoder to get a significant gain in terms of performance. Furthermore, when detection and decoding are implemented in a single function, complexity does not increase much.