GPS/AGPS chipset

Fujitsu Microelectronics has announced a two-chipset for high sensitivity GPS/AGPS receivers capable of indoors acquisition.

The MB87Q2040 and MB15H156 chipset achieves sensitivity, accuracy and TTFF with low power and a small PCB footprint.

They consist 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 serial interface (UART).

Capable of operating in both 'autonomous GPS/standalone' mode and 'assisted GPS' mode, the chipset is designed to work in mobile handsets using any air interface such as UMTS/WCDMA, GSM/GPRS, PDC and CDMA technologies.

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 0.11 µm technology results in a peak baseband power dissipation of 67 mW during low signal strength acquisition, while the continuous tracking (1 Hz update rate) power dissipation is less than 40 mW.

The acquisition/tracking engine on the chip has 44,000 effective correlators, resulting in high indoor sensitivity calibrated to -157.5 dBm and indoor accuracy of <20 m.