Broadcom Introduces Single-Chip GPS Solution for Mobile Applications
Broadcom announced its first single-chip global positioning system (GPS) solution, highlighting the company's successful integration of its Global Locate acquisition and its commitment to delivering the industry's best GPS technology.
GPS technologies have become increasingly important with growing consumer interest in personal navigation devices (PNDs) and the strong desire by cellular service operators to add location-based services to their offerings. According to research from In-Stat, approximately 47 million PNDs and more than 436 million mobile phones with GPS technology will ship in 2010. As GPS chip solutions become more integrated and costs decline, the technology will expand into a whole new range of applications.
The Broadcom BCM4750 is produced in a low cost 90 nanometer CMOS process and features superior receiver technology and tracking sensitivity. The receiver makes full use of the Global Locate architecture, and can measure the faintest GPS signals deep indoors and in "urban canyon" environments at signal levels as low as -162 dBm. It also consumes less than 15 mW while navigating with one second map updates. The BCM4750 also integrates a number of external components, resulting in a very small footprint to design GPS into mobile devices. A complete GPS solution featuring the BCM4750 will use less than 35 mm2 of board space, including all of the necessary components for a typical cellular phone implementation.
The BCM4750 is ideally suited for PNDs where rapid time-to-first-fix (TTFF) and superior navigation performance are required. In addition, products that include network connectivity, such as wireless PNDs and cellular phones, are able to exploit the full feature set of the BCM4750 software solution. These features include Assisted GPS (AGPS) and long-term orbit (LTO) extended ephemeris assistance, reducing TTFF to less than one second in many conditions. In all cases, Broadcom provides both the chip and the software including AGPS stacks and client software.
The BCM4750 is a single-die CMOS GPS receiver used for tracking and navigation, primarily in mobile devices. Its massive parallel hardware correlators provide faster signal searches, accurate real-time navigation, improved tracking sensitivity and very low average power consumption.
The BCM4750 includes software that is optimized for cellular integration and the demands of international standards bodies - such as 3GPP and SUPL - that promote high speed data in cellular systems. The software includes message handling protocols for user and control plane-assisted GPS standards, as well as native support for LTO extended ephemeris service. In addition, the software has been optimized for personal navigation performance and includes sophisticated algorithms to mitigate multipath errors.
The new Broadcom chip and associated software will be demonstrated at this week's Institute of Navigation (ION) conference in Ft. Worth, Texas beginning tomorrow.
