Highly sensitive GLONASS + GPS software receiver ported to Intel Atom and ARM7 architectures

Four days ago, I mentioned a qualitative jump in the miniaturization of GLONASS + GPS receivers due to the advent of the NAVIS chip, the size of a smaller ruble coin, and with a hundred million watt consumption.

This record NAVIS, however, did not remain outstanding for a long time on the general background. The day before yesterday, SPIRIT-Telecom announced that its GLONASS + GPS receiver is generally software, so that it can work on a regular Intel Atom processor via an external (USB stick) antenna. The processor Intel Atom, as it is known, is very small in size (see photo on the right). In addition, in many devices (netbooks and MID) the Atom chip is already installed, so you won't have to spend money on installing it.

In the same place , SPIRIT-Telecom says that the sensitivity of a modern commercial GPS receiver is approximately -190 dBW, and the sensitivity of the best domestic GLONASS receivers is no more than -180 dBW, but the sensitivity of the software SPIRIT navigation receiver on the Intel Atom platform reaches -210 dBW and allows you to confidently receive satellite signals indoors.

In addition to the Intel Atom, this receiver was ported to the core of the ARM7, whose architecture is freely licensed at a price of less than half a megabyte, which opens the way for domestic production. The company claims that its integrated chip based on the software SPIRIT-GG24-03S-ARM has dimensions of 13 × 13 mm, power consumption is less than 0.2 W and will cost from 450 rubles for mass circulation. (See photo on the right.)
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We note, however, that so far the NAVIS chip looks a bit more profitable, because it eats half the amount of electricity. Spiritual software will benefit only its unprecedented high sensitivity, and cross-platform, and even the prevalence of target hardware platforms (Atom and ARM).

Description of the receiver SPIRIT Telecom posted on the manufacturer's website . I note that the size of the external hardware (“radio input”) is shown on the diagram even more (20 × 20 mm) than the size of the chip with the software receiver stated above.



It turns out that the qualitative difference between this two-component system and the classic navigation module is about the same as between a winmodem (or rather, a soft-phone modem ) and a conventional modem: some functions are transferred to the central processor (in this case, Intel Atom or ARM), to significantly save on the cost of the receiver signal.