Broadcom announced its next generation single-chip global positioning system solution for mobile devices. This latest GPS receiver sets new standards in performance and low power consumption with state-of-the-art sensitivity and navigation performance, and provides the smallest printed circuit board footprint when compared to competitive solutions. The new Broadcom BCM4751 GPS receiver solution and associated software are now shipping in production handsets and will be demonstrated at next week’s 2010 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.
Highlights/Key Facts:
High consumer demand for location based services is driving market growth for GPS-enabled handsets with LBS being one of the fastest growing revenue segments. GPS chipsets are now regarded by network operators as an essential feature for 3G phones and marketing initiatives exploiting location based services are beginning to emerge from key device suppliers and network operators.
The Broadcom BCM4751 is a single-chip GPS receiver used for tracking and navigation, primarily in mobile devices. Its massively parallel, hardware correlator architecture provides faster signal searches, accurate real-time navigation, improved tracking sensitivity and very low average power consumption. The sensitivity and navigation performance of the BCM4751 continue to set the standard for the industry.
The BCM4751 also integrates a number of external components that reduce the overall system cost for manufacturers and enables very small footprints when designing GPS into mobile devices. With real estate in mobile devices at a premium, a complete GPS solution, featuring the BCM4751, will use less than 30 mm2 of board space, including all of the necessary components for a typical cellular phone implementation.
The BCM4751 supports additional satellite constellations including the Satellite Based Augmentation System and the Quasi-Zenith Satellite System for Japanese applications, making as many as twelve additional satellites available for use in navigation.
The key features of the new Broadcom BCM4751 GPS receiver include:
– 65 nanometer CMOS design featuring a highly integrated radio frequency and baseband processor with extremely low power consumption.
– The smallest complete PCB footprint: 30 mm2 including band-pass filter and passives.
– High sensitivity operation.
– Increased satellite availability: supports GPS, SBAS and QZSS satellites at L1 frequency band.
– Integrated power management allowing direct connection to the battery.
– Available in both wafer level ball grid array and fine pitch ball grid array packages.
The software includes message handling protocols for Control Plane and User Plane assisted-GPS standards such as SUPL1.0. The GPS software also provides native support for Broadcom’s Long Term Orbit extended ephemeris service. In addition, the software is optimized for personal navigation performance and includes sophisticated algorithms to mitigate multi-path errors.
