GPS World

Tag: smartphone

  • Death of a Smartphone, Birth of an Ad Trend

    Kevin Dennehy
    Kevin Dennehy

    From a distance, the Garmin-Asus partnership to produce GPS-enabled smartphones looked pretty good — particularly during the market erosion for portable navigation devices. However, published reports indicate that the companies will not renew their partnership in January 2011.

    Switzerland-based Garmin and its Dutch competitor TomTom have seen steeply declining sales for personal navigation devices (PNDs) since the high point of the market two years ago, industry observers say.

    “[The Garmin-Asus divorce] was predictable. The product didn’t sell very well and no partnership can survive forever if there’s no revenue coming,” said Marc Prioleau, Technology Growth Advisors principal. “The smartphone market is incredibly competitive and navigation is a pretty standard feature. So you’ve got small revenues, limited differentiation…not much to build a long-term partnership around.”

    Since the Garmin-Asus strategic alliance in February 2009, the companies said they have developed and marketed six devices. These products are available through carrier and retail channels in several countries. One of the phones, the Garmin-Asus A10, a touchscreen smartphone running on the Android platform, is optimized for pedestrian navigation.

    Location-Based Advertising. TeleNav, which now has 17 million subscribers, recently launched a navigation-based mobile advertising platform that allows businesses to place a sponsored listing at the top of the search results located in its mobile navigation applications. The company says users can click on a sponsored listing to receive additional information such as coupons or menu information.

    The user can call, map, or receive turn-by-turn directions to the business — all of which are actions TeleNav measures and reports as metrics to advertisers. Sounds like an interesting concept — but are carriers committing to it?

    “We see location-based advertising (LBA) as a natural and important extension of our business. As an industry, I feel that we are only at the tip of the iceberg on advertising within the intersection of location and mobile,” said Ky Tang, TeleNav director of marketing. “This is new for us and for the industry as a whole. While it’s difficult to speak on behalf of a carrier, in general, I’d say that they too see a significant opportunity here.”

    TeleNav released data saying which brands are winning the battle for the attention of the mobile consumer. Through analyzing keyword searches of millions of its mobile users, the company is able to identify where consumers are looking to go while on the road.

    “We do not in any way, shape, or form provide user-specific information to our advertisers,” Tang said. “We only provide aggregate information of how our users are engaging with their ads within our application. So in addition to the traditional impressions and clicks, we let advertisers know how many people conducted a ‘drive to’ to a specific business.”

    Tang said that, in regard to the company’s data analysis, it does provide aggregate data on what users are searching for when using the application. “We believe that this type of information is insightful for brands to really understand how users who are on the go remember and prefer certain brands over others,” he said. “For those whose brand equity isn’t as strong — as measured by how often our users search for their specific name — we give them the ability to promote their brand to the top of the list. One of the implications behind this is that in the mobile, location-based arena, perhaps there’s an opportunity for more brand equality.”

    While it remains to be seen whether the LBA space is close to seeing rapid growth, some advertising agencies are taking notice. “Some leading, innovative ad agencies see it and get it right away. But by and large, there’s still a lot of education that is required in this space,” Tang said. “Location-based advertising is very powerful and we see it to represent the next major wave of digital advertising. But in the same way that it took online advertising some time to blossom and become more mainstream, we see the same thing here for location-based advertising.”

  • Expert Advice: Location Changes Everything Mobile

    Charles Abraham
    Charles Abraham

    By Charles Abraham

    As today’s handsets and consumer devices become more sophisticated, manufacturers continue to incorporate more and more functionality into a small and sleek form factor. Today’s range of smartphones incorporate voice and data transceivers, GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cameras, music, touchscreen interfaces, compasses, motion sensors, cameras, storage cards, and many other technologies. Free turn-by-turn navigation services, such as offered on Google Android phones and iPhones, have created a compelling reason for many of us to own a GPS-equipped smartphone.

    The pressure on manufacturers to integrate so many functions into one small printed circuit board has fueled a race among semiconductor suppliers to offer new solutions combining GPS and wireless connectivity. Phones that are small and comfortable to hold mean less and less space available for the internal electronics. Large screen sizes and the trend to thinner and thinner devices means smaller, less efficient antennas, placing pressure on chip designers to improve integrated circuit (IC) performance to make up for antenna constraints.

    Finally, cost competition in these markets is intense, as operators compete to bring more users online.
    These forces have shaped several changes in the wireless semiconductors found in new smartphones. Three important enabling technologies are:

    • reduced-geometry semiconductor technologies,
    • wafer-scale packaging, and
    • combo chip integration.

    Let’s look at the trends in each area.

    Semiconductor transistor sizes have been shrinking for decades. GPS processors in the market today use transistor geometries with gate widths of 0.18 micrometers, 0.13 micrometers, 90 nanometers (nm), and 65 nm, the latter showing up in the newest handsets on the market. 40-nm-based ICs have been announced as well, and will find their way into the market in the next year or two.

    Each generation of technology offers a 50–100 percent increase in density for pure digital circuits. This so-called shrink has allowed designers to both reduce the size of chips and to pack in more performance — in GPS chips this usually means more tracking channels and more correlators for faster signal search. The area for non-digital circuits such as the radio receiver in a GPS has not been shrinking as fast as the digital portion. This had led to changes in architecture, with more and more functions going digital. Examples include digital band-shaping filters, digital gain adjustment, and sigma-delta analog- to-digital converters.

    Wafer-scale packaging has moved into the mainstream for GPS and other wireless ICs. Traditional ball-grid array (BGA) packaging requires placing a semiconductor die on a substrate. The substrate carries the balls (pins) and some interconnects, and the semiconductor die is connected to the substrate via wire bonds. For small ICs the overall package size may be 50 percent larger than the die itself, because of overhead of the space needed for wire bonds.

    By contrast, wafer-level ball grid array (WLBGA) packaging yields a finished packaged part with the same dimensions as the underlying die. Wire bonds are not used; a redistribution layer (RDL) is bonded to the silicon wafers and carries interconnections from the silicon to the balls. This type of packaging yields the smallest possible board footprint. It also places strict limitations on the number of package pins, since the pins must all fit under the chip and cannot be spaced too closely, due to board manufacturing constraints. Often designers struggle to provide the features customers seek while abiding by package pin-count limitations. Pins are shared or multiplexed to preserve flexibility.

    Combo-chip integration offers the ultimate solution for small size. A single IC with multiple functions will almost always be considerably smaller than several ICs on a printed board. The last two years have seen the introduction of several combo ICs containing GPS, including the Broadcom’s BCM2075 Bluetooth-FM-GPS combo IC. Combo ICs like this allow manufacturers to build cellular handsets that would be difficult or impossible to create using discrete chip sets. Since GPS, FM, and Bluetooth have become standard features across many product lines, manufacturers not only benefit from small size but also economies of scale, designing a single part into dozens of devices.

    The benefits of combo ICs are easy to understand, but making these devices brings unique challenges. First and foremost, these ICs are wireless devices containing multiple sensitive radios, where every fraction of a decibel of performance counts. With few exceptions, handset manufacturers and their wireless operator customers are not willing to sacrifice radio performance in their quest for miniaturization and cost reduction. Each function on the wireless combo IC must perform as well as its counterpart function in a stand-alone IC.

    However, in a combo IC the radios are at most a few millimeters apart from each other. Designing for this type of integration requires engineering attention at multiple stages of the design. Up front, during the system engineering phase, component specifications must be set that minimize interference between radio subsystems, considering not just the radios on the combo IC but the influence of other radios in a handset as well. For example, in setting the specification for the second-order intercept point of the GPS receiver, system engineers must consider the fact that transmissions in 825 MHz cellular band can mix with Bluetooth transmissions at 2400 MHz to yield an intermodulation product at 1575 MHz, right in the middle of the GPS receive band. Designers also choose clock frequencies to avoid interference; for example, a GPS baseband processor that clocks at 100 MHz might be changed to 75 MHz to avoid the FM receive band. These are just a couple of examples of the many scenarios and considerations that must be examined early in the design process.

    Once the system engineer has done his or her job, the next level of interference mitigation falls on the analog designers. They choose where to place circuits, how to structure the semiconductor layers, how to drive and load interconnects, and how to properly filter supply voltages to avoid undesired interactions. Keeping spurious products off local oscillator signals is a key challenge. GPS receivers have 100 dB or more of gain to amplify very weak GPS signals to a usable level. Due to this high gain, even a tiny spurious product on a local oscillator can have the effect of tuning in an undesired cellular transmitter. For example, a spurious product offset 135 MHz will tune a cellular transmitter at 1710 MHz down to 1575 MHz, again right in the middle of the GPS band. Avoiding these interactions requires experienced designers who can anticipate complex issues. Mistakes can be costly, with each mask for each IC iteration going into seven figures.

    As the challenges of combo ICs are overcome, it’s likely the future will bring even more in the way of wireless technology integration. This in turn will provide even more opportunities for GPS to penetrate a broader set of handsets and cellular devices, making this exciting technology available to more consumers every day.

    CHARLES ABRAHAM is senior director of engineering for the GPS Business Unit at Broadcom, which he joined via acquisition of Global Locate, a company he co-founded in 2000. Previously, he worked at Ashtech, Magellan, Trimble, and Hughes Electronics.

  • Letters to the Editor: Smartphone Revolution

    Nice article on “The Smartphone Revolution” in the December issue. I am not so tech-y about the working of GPS/indoor GPS, but I am interested more in this technology specific to indoor GPS (repeaters).

    Can the smartphones get indoor GPS signals correctly and quickly? If the smart phones are really smart that they can connect to GPS satellite from indoor locations, then do the GPS repeater products become obsolete?

    — Saad B.

    Author Frank van Diggelen replies:
    The simple answer to your first question is yes, many of these smartphones can get GPS signals indoors. But indoors is a big and varied place, and the more complete answer is that the term “indoor GPS,” like “offroad vehicle,” describes the presence of a capability, not the absence of all limitations. So even if your GPS receiver works indoors in some locations, there will always be other places it doesn’t. And it will generally work better where there are stronger signals, like outdoors.

    Similarly, for your second question, high-sensitivity GPS will work some places indoors, but not everywhere, so there is a role for repeaters. However, GPS repeaters are like a long cable from the repeater’s receiving GPS antenna; so any GPS receiver that gets signals from a repeater will compute the position of the repeater’s receiving GPS antenna.

    Nice article. One comment and one question.

    Comment: The IGS ultra-rapids that started in 1999–2000 were from the beginning available for the future. They always contained 24 hours of estimated orbits and 24 hours of predicted orbits usable in real time. As I was responsible for generating these products within the IGS at that time, I am pretty sure that was the case.

    Question: I do not understand why you write that turning off SA (Seletive Availability) was an enabler for A-GPS!? I know that one possible feature of SA was an artificial degradation of the satellite ephemerides but this option was never exercised to my knowledge. So using a global network to obtain broadcast ephemerides and predict them into the future was always possible. Nothing fundamentally changed when SA was turned off!?

    — Tim Springer

    Frank van Diggelen replies:
    Just to be clear, the article enumerated seven enabling technologies for the revolution of GPS in cell phones (they are: A-GPS; massive parallel correlation; high sensitivity; coarse-time navigation; low-power TOW decoding; host-based GPS; and RF-CMOS), and a dominant spin-off technology: long-term orbits good for many days into the future.
    The demise of SA made it easier to predict long-term orbits for two reasons: technical and commercial.

    Technically, if you used the code- or carrier-phase measurements in your orbit modeling, then it was easier if these measurements were not degraded. Of course, you could have corrected them differentially, but the article makes the point that things were harder (not impossible) when SA was on.

    On the other hand, if all you did was use the broadcast ephemeris in your predictions, then as you suggest nothing changed, technically, if the ephemeris degradation option was not exercised. But the fact that this degradation option existed made it a more difficult commercial proposition to develop a system for predicting many days of ephemeris. Thus the end of SA certainly helped facilitate the commercial availability of predicted ephemeris that is valid for many days into the future.