Broadcom's new GPS chip to provide 30-cm accuracy in your phone

[WMGroomAK]

In news coming out of the ION GNSS+ conference in Portland, OR today, Broadcom has announced that they will be launching their new BCM 47755 GPS chip and it should be in some smartphones in 2018.  What makes this interesting (at least to me) is that this new chip uses both the L1 and L5 signal from GNSS satellites to refine it's accuracy from the current 5-meter accuracy down to 30-cm accuracy.  While still not good enough to measure the motion of tectonic plates, this level of accuracy should improve your road navigation abilities quite drastically as your phone will be able to tell more accurately whether you are on a main road or an access road.  In addition to all of this, they are also proposing a 50% power savings from these chips over the previous receivers, which should definitely help to improve battery life.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/design/superaccurate-gps-chips-coming-to-smartphones-in-2018

Quote

We’ve all been there. You’re driving down the highway, just as Google Maps instructed, when Siri tells you to “Proceed east for one-half mile, then merge onto the highway.” But you’re already on the highway. After a moment of confusion and perhaps some rude words about Siri and her extended AI family, you realize the problem: Your GPS isn’t accurate enough for your navigation app to tell if you’re on the highway or on the road beside it.

 

Those days are nearly at an end. At the ION GNSS+ conference in Portland, Ore., today Broadcom announced that it is sampling the first mass-market chip that can take advantage of a new breed of global navigation satellite signals and will give the next generation of smartphones 30-centimeter accuracy instead of today’s 5-meters. Even better, the chip works in a city’s concrete canyons, and it consumes half the power of today’s generation of chips. The chip, the BCM47755, has been included in the design of some smartphones slated for release in 2018, but Broadcom would not reveal which.

 

GPS and other global navigation satellite services (GNSSs) such as Europe’s Galileo, Japan’s QZSS, and Russia’s Glonass allow a receiver to determine its position by calculating its distance from three or more satellites. All GNSS satellites—even the oldest generation still in use—broadcast a message called the L1 signal that includes the satellite’s location, the time, and an identifying signature pattern. A newer generation broadcasts a more complex signal called L5 at a different frequency in addition to the legacy L1 signal. The receiver essentially uses these signals to fix its distance from each satellite based on how long it took the signal to go from satellite to receiver.

 

Broadcom’s receiver first locks on to the satellite with the L1 signal and then refines its calculated position with L5. The latter is superior, especially in cities, because it is much less prone to distortions from multipath reflections than L1.

I'm personally looking forward to this as it should help to develop some better mapping applications that can be phone based as opposed to having a separate high accuracy receiver.

 

Hot Hardware Article: https://hothardware.com/news/broadcom-avago-gps-chip-technology-breakthrough-to-deliver-inch-level-accuracy-for-smartphones

[HeathCliff]

Still gonna get lost the moment I step out of my house

[mynameisjuan]

I care more about the 50% power saving rather than whether or not I am 5 steps away from where it says I am.

[Taf the Ghost]

Gives the sniper drones a chance at better headshots.

[The Benjamins]

1 hour ago, mynameisjuan said:

I care more about the 50% power saving rather than whether or not I am 5 steps away from where it says I am.

With this level of accuracy it can navigate you through a mall with Google maps.

[mr moose]

Now spyware can map out your house, when you take dump and how long you spend in front of the t.v.  Combined with audio beacon they can even work out what channel you are watching. 

[captain_to_fire]

How about power consumption? GPS is such a big power hog.

[WMGroomAK]

3 minutes ago, hey_yo_ said:

How about power consumption? GPS is such a big power hog.

According to the Spectrum Article, the new chip will supposedly be 50% more power efficient over current chips.  Basically they are moving to a 28nm manufacturing process, using a big.Little design for the sensor hub (Cortex M-0 for continuous tasks & M-4 for more power demand tasks) and a new radio architecture that they aren't talking about.

Quote

Broadcom had to get the improved accuracy to work within a smartphone’s limited power budget. Fundamentally, that came down to three things: moving to a more power-efficient 28-nanometer-chip manufacturing process, adopting a new radio architecture (which Broadcom would not disclose the details of), and designing a power-saving dual-core sensor hub. In total, they add up to a 50 percent power savings over Broadcom’s previous, less accurate chip. 

Quote

The sensor hub in the BCM47755 takes advantage of the ARM’s “big.LITTLE” design—a dual-core architecture in which a simple low-power processor core is paired with a more complex core. The low-power core, in this case an ARM Cortex M-0, handles simple, continuous tasks. The more powerful but power-hungry core, a Cortex M-4, comes in only when it’s needed.

 

[themctipers]

My 6s has good enough GPS to navigate a mall (did that thrice). What we need is better efficiency, not better tracking. Scary.. 

[KWelz]

Hmm..  Did they lift the restrictions on civilian GPS accuracy?  

[AnonymousGuy]

21 minutes ago, KWelz said:

Hmm..  Did they lift the restrictions on civilian GPS accuracy?  

In like 1996....

 

We do turn off non-military GPS in warzones though.

[WMGroomAK]

23 minutes ago, KWelz said:

Hmm..  Did they lift the restrictions on civilian GPS accuracy?  

The Selective Availability restrictions of GPS for civilian GPS was lifted on May of 2000.  With the number of non-US constellations that civilian GPS has access to now, it probably wouldn't matter what the US government did as you would still get service from a different constellation like Russia's GLONASS or the EU Galileo constellation.

 

http://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/performance/accuracy/

 

[KWelz]

Well obviously I am behind the times on this topic.  Thanks guys. 

 

[captain_to_fire]

7 hours ago, themctipers said:

My 6s has good enough GPS to navigate a mall (did that thrice). What we need is better efficiency, not better tracking. Scary.. 

Indoor navigation doesn’t use GPS but uses cellular signal and nearby wifi hotspots. 

[themctipers]

4 minutes ago, hey_yo_ said:

Indoor navigation doesn’t use GPS but uses cellular signal and nearby wifi hotspots. 

Pretty sure I have wifi disabled on iOS 9, and that actually disables wifil.

[captain_to_fire]

44 minutes ago, themctipers said:

Pretty sure I have wifi disabled on iOS 9, and that actually disables wifil.

Cellular signal can be used for indoor navigation

[themctipers]

Just now, hey_yo_ said:

Cellular signal can be used for indoor navigation

Yes, pretty sure it uses that too.. 

[Crossbred]

Pokemon go just got upgraded...

[ScratchCat]

The improvement of accuracy will not be important in most cases , however the efficiency could open many new areas. GPS watches could suddenly get an approx ~70% boost in battery life and navigating with a phone could finally get of the list of the ways to make a fire. Additionally for embedded systems power consumption can be a noticeable factor if GPS is running for longer periods of time .