Thalwil, Switzerland–based embedded GNSS receiver provider u-blox has announced the upgrade of its core CMOS technology to u-blox 6, with substantially reduced power requirements as the result of new "intelligent," user-selectable power management features. According to the company, these innovations enable significantly extended battery life for power-critical GPS applications.
Thalwil, Switzerland–based embedded GNSS receiver provider u-blox has announced the upgrade of its core CMOS technology to u-blox 6, with substantially reduced power requirements as the result of new "intelligent," user-selectable power management features. According to the company, these innovations enable significantly extended battery life for power-critical GPS applications.
With the extension of the acquisition engine to over 2 million correlators, the new chip exhibits stronger acquisition capability of weak signals and a shorter time to first fix. In addition to GPS, u-blox 6 is "future-proofed" for the upcoming new European satellite system Galileo.
u-blox 6 also supports the company’s proprietary “YUMA” GPS software and service, an instantaneous and ultra-low power location capture solution based on u-blox’ “Capture & Process” technology targeted for battery-powered applications such as tracking and photo geotagging.
First samples of GPS receiver UBX-G6010 single-chip and UBX-G6000/G0010 chipset will be available by the end of this year for customer evaluation, with the LEA and NEO GPS receiver module families being upgraded shortly afterwards, according to u-blox. The ANTARIS 4 and u-blox 5 family products remain fully supported as are u-blox’s OMA SUPL compliant AssistNOW Online and AssistNOW Offline A-GPS services. Existing u-blox customers will benefit from the pin-to-pin compatible products.
Compared to the current u-blox 5 technology, the u-blox 6 provides faster acquisition in weak signal condition (3GPP compliant), a three-decibel improvement in signal sensitivity, and a programmable update rate ranging from 1 fix per second up to 1 per 12 days (with a 60 percent power saving over u-blox 5 at 1-hertz update rate), according to the company.
“Moving on to u-blox 6 is an important milestone for u-blox and our customers as market demand increases for GPS solutions with high sensitivity, long battery life and instant location capture. u-blox 6–based products will bring significant benefits to OEMs of real-time GPS products as well as to extremely low-power logger applications requiring weeks or months of battery life” said Andreas Thiel, executive vice-president for R&D hardware, and co-founder of u-blox.
Key application areas for u-blox–6 based products include ultra-low power GPS loggers, asset and fleet management, people and animal trackers, automotive GPS black boxes, personal navigation and recreational devices as well as cameras and camera phones with geotagging capability. u-blox 6 ICs will be available in standard and automotive grade versions.
