EnSilica, a chip maker of mixed-signal application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), has been awarded funding from the UK Space Agency under its Connectivity in Low-Earth Orbit (C-LEO) program. Following a competitive selection process, EnSilica has been awarded £10.38 million ($12.8 million) throughout the next three years for a development project pioneered by EnSilica.
“This is a great opportunity to accelerate our chipset development, enabling us to extend our portfolio of chips for the satellite broadband market with a focus on providing a complete solution for user terminals while reducing cost and power,“ said Paul Morris, EnSilica vice president of RF and communications business unit.
EnSilica provided its application with supporting letters of interest from potential lead customers to develop a family of semiconductor chips to support future generations of mass market satellite broadband user terminals. According to the company, the terminals will be capable of connecting with various satellite constellations and will leverage advanced semiconductor technology. In addition, the project will provide a resilient source of chips, which will be independent and not tied to specific satellite service operators.
The UK Space Agency’s C-LEO program was launched in 2024 and is designed to ensure that the UK space sector remains competitive in the rapidly evolving global market for low-earth orbit constellations. With a total funding pool of up to £160 million ($198 million) available over the next four years, the C-LEO program supports the development of smarter satellites, enhanced hardware, artificial intelligence-driven data delivery and improved inter-satellite connections.
This new project builds on EnSilica’s long history of collaboration with the UK Space Agency and the European Space Agency, alongside other key satellite communications partnerships and the company’s own investment in the technology.
When I was a kid, two of my hometown’s burger drive-ins attracted the hungry attention of my sister and myself, causing us to hound our parents to take us “out to dinner” upon the slightest pretext. Only one of them, however, boasted a sign claiming “400 million served.”
This was a staggering number to an eight-year-old. I hypothesized that everyone in the world must have consumed several by now — a very good argument for me to have one tonight.
The desire to provoke similar reasoning could form part of the motivation for the China Satellite Navigation Office to announce that sales of BeiDou-based chips have exceeded 80 million. Ran Chengqi, director of the CSNO, delivered the number in a report on the 10th China Satellite Navigation Conference held in Beijing on May 22.
“It would be stretching a point to say that satnav chips are the burgers of the future, but it’s not an exaggeration to assert that they are becoming a commodity on the world market.”
Now, 80 million falls short of 400 million, but that next hurdle is well within reach, considering the size, potential and explosive growth of the Chinese market, to say nothing of others along the Great Belt and Road, a global development area of infrastructure development and investments in 152 countries and organizations in Asia, Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
The BeiDou number pales in comparison to the 3.15 billion units of total GNSS chips that global consumption is expected to hit in 2022. By a reasonable projection, BeiDou-enabled chips will by then constitute a major if not the lion’s share of that number.
Of course, GPS-enabled chips will form a greater majority, if not the totality. All chips will — unless the world radically changes — be GPS-enabled to start, and then have some combination of other GNSS in addition.
Big Numbers. Ran Chengqi further said that 22-nanometer dual-frequency BeiDou chips are ready for commercial applications.
According to the China Global Television Network, 116 new positioning-capable cellphone models applied to enter the Chinese market in the first quarter of 2019; 82 of them carry BeiDou-enabled chips. The latest government report on the scale of China’s satnav industry anticipates it will reach 400 billion yuan (US$ 57.8 billion) by 2020.
The news agency stated that more than six million vehicles in 36 cities use BeiDou; long-distance operations and precision farming help raise output by 5% while saving 10% of fuel costs; and more than 70,000 fishing vessels employ BeiDou’s short messaging service.
BeiDou’s rapid success in a relatively short term echoes that of GPS and GNSS in general. It would be stretching a point to say that satnav chips are the burgers of the future, but it’s not any exaggeration or distortion to assert that they are becoming — if they have not already become — a commodity on the world market.
By the way, those golden arches have since 1994 stopped counting and updating their published burger tally. All the signs simply say “billions and billions served.”
After many years of development at the fringe of the GNSS industry, dual-frequency GNSS devices are finally ready to hit the mass market and will account for more than a billion chipset shipments in 2023, according to a new market data report by ABI Research.
ABI Research is a market-foresight advisory firm.
The report finds that the bulk of this growth will come from the adoption in the smartphone market with consumers hungry for better location accuracy.
Dual-band GNSS can mitigate the multipath interference effects, which are especially present in areas with a high density of buildings, like urban canyons, and deliver significantly higher accuracy than single-frequency devices.
Broadcom’s BCM47755 chip. (Image: Broadcom)
However, several obstacles prevented widespread adoption of dual-band GNSS until now, including insufficient satellite coverage of a second band, which could be L2 or L5/E5, high chipset prices, and challenges in fitting these integrated circuits and related antennas into small devices such as smartphones.
“On the availability side, this year has seen several satellites launched into orbit every month, most of them fitted with L5/E5 capabilities, and the Chinese and European Union governments plan to have their satellite constellations fully operational by 2020. L5/E5 devices will not be left in the dark,” said Henrique Rocha, a research analyst for Location Technologies at ABI Research.
Furthermore, new breakthroughs from key chipset manufacturers are disrupting this market by overcoming the barriers to mass dual-frequency adoption. With Location-Based Services (LBS) applications in mind, Broadcom has released the BCM47755 dual-band location hub, claiming the system’s architecture achieves the synergistic benefits that cannot be reached by multiple integrated circuits (ICs), thereby reducing its overall size and power consumption.
Other important players in this market have also come forward with dual-frequency solutions, including Qualcomm with the Snapdragon X24 LTE modem and HiSilicon with the Kirin 980 system-on-a-chip. Both attribute their superior energy efficiency and form factor to intelligent data processing and a FinFET transistor design. Other chipset manufacturers such as MediaTek are expected to follow suit and present their own dual-band products for LBS.
The Xiaomi Mi 8. (Photo: Xiaomi)
At the consumer level, considering the handset market is the largest GNSS segment, accounting for 85 percent of all GNSS chipset shipments in 2018, the launch of the dual-frequency Xiaomi Mi 8, Xiaomi Mi Mix 3 and the Huawei Mate 20 following such breakthroughs in the chipset industry is a significant development because it opens a new lane of competition between smartphone manufacturers.
It is expected that dual-frequency devices will dominate the high-end smartphone market in a matter of a few years, and by 2023 dual-band GNSS ICs will comprise 36% of total GNSS LBS IC shipments worldwide.
Triple-frequency chips. In other significant markets for multi-frequency GNSS, such as surveying and automotive applications, triple-frequency chipsets are being released, including STMicroelectronics’ TeseoAPP and u-blox’s F9. Adding a third frequency allows for better noise correction and higher accuracy compared to dual-frequency.
Image: u-blox
ABI Research believes that triple-frequency devices will see, at least for now, a relatively shy adoption as manufacturers will need to justify the cost and overcome the power issues they tackled for dual-frequency devices.
“For LBS the comparatively small accuracy gain going from dual- to triple-frequency GNSS is not worth the extra effort — for now. However, we will probably see triple-frequency GNSS take off when cars fitted with advanced driver assistance and autonomous driving systems begin to ship in large quantities,” added Rocha.
With full satellite operability of the main GNSS bands on the horizon and chipset manufacturers overcoming past hurdles for implementing dual-frequency solutions, it is likely a matter of time before most major companies in the segment scramble for a piece of this promising market. OEMs now need to show customers that dual-frequency GNSS can indeed deliver the accuracy they have promised so new location use cases can be sustained and introduced to the market.
QY Research has released its Global GNSS Chips Market Research Report 2017, a comprehensive study on the global GNSS chip market. The report is segmented based on applications, end-users, technology and geography.
The report covers key players, current trends and influences on the global market. Investment return analysis, SWOT analysis and feasibility studies were used to analyze the key global market players’ growth in the industry.
Highlights of the report include:
A complete backdrop analysis, including an assessment of the parent market.
Important changes in market dynamics.
Market segmentation.
Historical, current and projected market size, including value and volume.
Reporting and evaluation of recent industry developments.
Broadcom Corporation has announced a new GNSS chip for Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable devices that simplifies integration of GNSS into low-cost products. The advanced chip enables devices such as fitness bands to deliver pinpoint location while consuming minimal power and in some cases can eliminate the need for a separate microcontroller (MCU).
The Broadcom BCM47748 removes a bulk of the signal processing from the device MCU by calculating position, velocity and time (PVT) on-chip, delivering significant system power savings. The chip uses intelligent firmware to extend battery life while also maintaining accuracy in speed, distance and position for an enhanced user experience.
Broadcom At ION GNSS+: Broadcom’s Stephen Mole is presenting on the topic of achieving low power consumption in wearables at ION GNSS+ 2015, taking place Sept. 14-18 at the Tampa Convention Center in Florida. Stephen will present during the A5 session, Applications using Consumer GNSS, on Friday, Sept. 18, at 9:40 a.m. inRoom 23.
“Broadcom is extending its navigation leadership into the IoT ecosystem by helping customers deliver a premium location experience without compromising battery life or requiring a costly, power-hungry host processor,” said Prasan Pai, Broadcom senior director, Wireless Connectivity. “With more consumers demanding GNSS in a wider variety of applications, we see a tremendous opportunity to expand our reach into new devices with market-leading GNSS technology.”
By absorbing location computations on-chip, Broadcom not only reduces power consumption but can also dramatically lower costs for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) by replacing the device MCU and reducing board space. Additionally, firmware inside the BCM47748 automatically adapts to user activity and context, whether biking, walking or running, to provide precise location results to the user, enabling performance that is not sacrificed for power savings.
Key features:
PVT computed on-chip
Integrated GNSS receiver with concurrent support for GPS and GLONASS, combined with accelerometer inputs to produce stable, accurate and low power speed and distance
Context engine and adaptive firmware to enable low power consumption for every activity and context without compromising accuracy
Ability to produce GNSS fixes with only 5mA current consumption in certain scenarios
MCU host interfaces include SPI, UART or I2C
Sensor interfaces include I2C master, SPI master, I2S, ADC and GPIO
Large on-chip memory for enhanced PVT accuracy and customer applications
Embedded processor with self-boot capability
Geofencing and lifelogging capabilities
70 ball WLBGA package with 0.4mm ball pitch
The Broadcom BCM47748 is currently sampling with customers. Evaluation kits and reference designs are also available.
