An MCM based GPS receiver

The GPS receiver market place is now dominated by commercial rather than military applications for which the system was designed originally. New applications areas are appearing constantly with the most buoyant including low cost hand-held navigation units, receivers for automotive navigation and location, synchronisation of digital cellular systems and high accuracy receivers for the surveying community. Success in these commercial market places means having a product that can deliver the required level of performance within strict cost, size and power consumption constraints. These three key requirements can be met by maximising the integration level in the receiver and indeed, a lot of the present, basic performance, commercially available receivers are based on two core ASICs, RF and DSP/digital. This paper introduces the RF ASIC designed by Navstar, ROCIII, that delivers an “antenna to digital” solution