Fujitsu Microelectronics Europe (FME) Wednesday announced a 2-chipset solution for high sensitivity GPS/AGPS receivers capable of indoors acquisition. The Fujitsu chipset achieves high performance (sensitivity, accuracy and TTFF) with low power and a small PCB footprint.
The highly integrated solution consists of a baseband chip and an RF front end chip (supporting GPS L-band C/A code). The baseband chip interfaces to a host CPU/MCU via a simple serial interface (UART).
Capable of operating in both ‘autonomous GPS/standalone’ mode and ‘assisted GPS’ mode, the chipset is designed to work in cellular handsets using any air interface such as UMTS/WCDMA, GSM/GPRS, PDC and CDMA technologies. It is versatile in that a receiver can be initially developed as an autonomous GPS receiver and subsequently software upgraded to AGPS when assistance becomes available.
Fujitsu provides a software library (API) for interfacing to the application software layer. The control software on the host CPU is processor and OS independent running as a single thread requiring no real-time interrupts, RTOS or host libraries.
The employment of power-saving techniques with the 0.11um technology results in a peak baseband power dissipation of 67mW during low signal strength acquisition, while the continuous tracking (1Hz update rate) power dissipation is less than 40mW.
The Acquisition/tracking engine on the chip has 44000 effective correlators, resulting in high indoor sensitivity calibrated to -157.5dBm and indoor accuracy of 20m. The chipset meets FCC-E911 requirements for October 2005. The solution achieves fast TTFF of 1s when hot and around 32s when cold for outdoors fixes.
The baseband chip (MB87Q2040) incorporates a highly optimised GPS/AGPS baseband IP licensed from eRide Inc. eRide’s patented and proven GPS/AGPS IP, is based on extensive experience the company has gained in the GPS market.
The RF front-end chip (MB15H156), based on Fujitsu’s BiCMOS process, integrates most RF-externals and features on-chip IF-filters, VCO, PLL, oscillators and LNA, resulting in a reduced BOM cost and component count and minimising the board area. Fujitsu is also developing a CMOS RF front-end which will be introduced later this year.
The MB87Q2040 and MB15H156 are housed in 7x7mm 48-pin and 5x5mm 32-pin BCC plastic packages respectively (keeping pin pitch at 0.5mm), giving a complete solution footprint of below 100mm2. The chipset operates over the industrial temperature range of -40 to +85 degrees C.
