4-channel Multiband All GNSS compliant RF Front End IC: Bringing Professional Level Equipment to Mass Market

摘要

The article describes Nomada project: Multi-channel multi-band RF FE product intended to excite research of high precision and anti-jamming navigation solutions for mass-market applications. Nowadays we witness rapid automatization of everyday life. Most of routines are already automatic, aimed to release time resources for creativity. Many people use car navigation even on everyday way home or to office. We do not notice that, neither when cooking by "press the button" nor when sleep under wristband control. One of upcoming things to be resolved is driving. We still drive manually, and reason for that is no more technological - it is economical. Navigation precision and update rates needed for safe automated vehicle guidance are now at the area of professional applications. Although racing telemetry or experimental cars may use expensive hardware, mass-market vendors cannot spend 5% of vehicle price on navigation device. Speaking about obvious things, we see that price-braking factors are demonopolization and competition. Currently satellite navigation expertise is mostly concentrated in digital domain, while RF FEs use more or less similar principles. As for prototyping expenses we see opposite situation: math-related tasks are prototyped at almost no cost, while getting analog ASIC is a tricky task. All items on the market are either expensive, not suitable or unavailable for low quantities. The goal of Nomada project started by NTLab is designing professional level navigational RF FE suitable for most applications, followed by spreading it among developers at near production cost – both ASICs and evaluation kits. NT1065 Nomada is a four-channel highly integrated RF FE, able to operate simultaneously with almost any combination of GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou, IRNSS, QZSS in L1, L2, L3, L5, E1, E5a, E5b, E6, B1 C, B1I(Q), B1-2I(Q), B2, B3 frequency bands with two integrated LO synthesizers. RF FE is intended to be used with active antennas and is characterized by 4 dB noise figure, input -29 dBm of 1 dB compression at 20 dB gain, 40 dB inter-channel isolation, >60 dB IF gain range.