A Quad-Constellation Monolithic GNSS Receiver

Charles Norman and Andreas Warloe

Abstract:	Starting with the first commercial GPS receivers, adding support for incrementally more complex GNSS systems present significant challenges for GNSS HW and SW developers. The latest systems, especially Galileo, were designed with the assumption that More’s law would provide nearly unlimited computing resources, memory and clock speeds over time. The expected improvements in ASIC technology have indeed occurred, but market demands have pushed the size, cost and power consumption of GNSS chipsets down, rather than allowing capabilities to grow freely. GNSS in cellular phones is now expected to be “always on” and add only a few dollars to the cost of a $600 smartphone. Even as customers and phone manufacturers demand GLONASS, BeiDou (BDS) and Galileo support, chipset cost is not allowed to increase significantly. Instead of in essence designing four separate GNSS receivers in the chip, cost and size pressures force designers to look for commonality between the signals in order to share HW blocks and SW or DSP algorithms. This paper presents Broadcom’s GNSS tri-band receiver technology, which combined with Broadcom’s baseband search and track engines allow true simultaneous tracking of all current L1 GNSS signals, including GPS, GLONASS, QZSS, BDS (MEO, IGSO and GEO), Galileo and SBAS systems.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 27th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2014) September 8 - 12, 2014 Tampa Convention Center Tampa, Florida
Pages:	280 - 284
Cite this article:	Norman, Charles, Warloe, Andreas, "A Quad-Constellation Monolithic GNSS Receiver," Proceedings of the 27th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2014), Tampa, Florida, September 2014, pp. 280-284.
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