Fujitsu And Global Locate Intro Gl-16000 Ic For Wireless Gps Apps

EDP Weekly's IT Monitor, March 11, 2002

Fujitsu Microelectronics America, Inc. (FMA) and Global Locate Inc. have jointly introduced a fast, low-power receiver that lets wireless phones receive GPS satellite signals indoors.

Designed to add location capabilities to wireless products, the GL-16000 GPS Baseband Processor has 500 times more hardware correlators than a typical GPS receiver, providing fast start-up, with a time-to-first-fix of 250 milliseconds. The chip requires less than 0.0005 percent of battery charge per fix, far lower than competing technologies. The processor is capable of acquiring satellite signals below -158dBm, enabling GPS signal reception indoors.

The GL-16000 can be combined with Global Locate's GL-HSRF High Sensitivity Tuner device to form Global Locate's IndoorGPS solution, or the chip can be used with other tuners, depending on customer requirements.

The IndoorGPS chip set is highly integrated for minimum size and cost. The wireless system CPU interacts with the chip set through a parallel data bus to the GL-16000, and a serial bus to the GL-HSRF. All of the computationally demanding GPS processing occurs in the GL-16000; thus CPU loading and memory requirements of the software are minimal.

Global Locate designed the IndoorGPS architecture. Last spring, in the first stage of their collaboration, FMA and Global Locate announced that Fujitsu would manufacture the GL-16000. Now the companies are expanding that collaboration to include co-branding and marketing activities in North America.

"Global Locate is an exciting industry innovator in the design and development of low-power, high-performance indoor GPS technology that improves wireless acquisition and sensitivity by an order of magnitude," said Keith Horn, FMA's vice president of marketing. "No other GPS receiver can operate in almost any indoor and outdoor environment. With this announcement we are making a major step forward in wireless GPS leadership."

"Global Locate set out to create a GPS receiver unlike any other ever made," said Dr. Frank van Diggelen, Global Locate's vice president of marketing. "The GL-16000 is the successful result, with 100x improvements in power consumption, start-up times and sensitivity. The device is not only novel in concept and architecture, but vastly different in the resulting performance."