In this paper, a multi-cell joint channel estimation (JCE) method is proposed for the TD-SCDMA downlink. In the proposed multi-cell JCE approach, the received midambles from adjacent cells are jointly processed, rather than being treated as interference as in single cell channel estimation. By jointly processing all the received midambles, the user can simultaneously estimate the channel impulse responses (CIRs) for both its home cell and adjacent cells. If the received signal from adjacent cells has a delay, multi-cell JCE is still operable with slight adjustment in the midamble matrix, and the performance loss is also minor. The performance of multi-cell JCE is analyzed and evaluated by simulations. The results demonstrate that the proposed multi-cell JCE method can significantly improve the channel estimation accuracy. When the signal from each cell has similar power level, the mean square error (MSE) of the estimated CIRs for all cells is lower than 0.01. With more accurate CIRs from multi-cell JCE, multi-cell JD also yields better performance compared with the single cell channel estimation methods.