Product category:
Communications ICs (Wireless)
News Release from: Broadcom Corp | Subject: BCM4750
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 26 September 2007
GPS IC is a sensitive sort
Single-chip GPS receiver can measure the faintest GPS signals deep indoors and in "urban canyon" environments at signal levels as low as -162dBm.
Broadcom has developed its first single-chip GPS device The GPS receiver sets new standards in performance and power consumption with state-of-the-art sensitivity and navigation performance, and less than half the power consumption of competitive solutions
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 19 Oct 2005 at 8.00am (UK)
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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.
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"As consumer use of location-based services grows, we are seeing an incredible amount of interest from our customers in the cellular and PND markets for GPS and assisted GPS technologies", says Scott Pomerantz, Vice President and General Manager of Broadcom's GPS line of business.
"Broadcom has now established itself as a technology leader in the GPS chip market with a solution that provides the industry's best tracking sensitivity, lowest average power and most complete portfolio of software, complemented by the company's unique ability to integrate its GPS technology into other leading mobile chips and processors".
The Broadcom BCM4750 is produced in a low cost 90nm 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 -162dBm.
It also consumes less than 15mW while navigating with 1s map updates, less than half the power of competing solutions (according to published datasheets).
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.
Broadcom also maintains a worldwide reference network with land-based GPS receivers located around the earth's equator, and carrier hardened servers to collect and provide AGPS and LTO data directly to GPS equipped cellular phones and wireless PNDs.
Working hand-in-hand with the BCM4750 and Broadcom's client software, customer products are able to take full advantage of the benefits of AGPS and LTO.
By providing this service along with the chip, Broadcom is able to offer OEMs s a one-stop-shop for all of their positioning technology needs.
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.
With tracking sensitivity of -162dBm, the BCM4750 sets a new benchmark for the industry.
Enhanced tracking sensitivity allows GPS-enabled mobile devices to detect very weak signals including those partially blocked or reflected by buildings or other structures.
In these environments, GPS units sometimes fail to achieve a location "fix" or take a long time to do so.
With the high sensitivity of the new BCM4750 GPS receiver chip, these initial location fixes occur much faster and in many cases, the BCM4750 can get a fix where competitors' products do not get a fix at all.
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 35mm2 of board space, including all of the necessary components for a typical cellular phone implementation.
The BCM4750 includes software that is optimised 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 optimised for personal navigation performance and includes sophisticated algorithms to mitigate multipath errors.
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