u-blox 6 Designed as Low-Power GPS Platform

September 11, 2009

u-blox (Thalwil, Switzerland), has upgraded its core CMOS technology to u-blox 6. Products based on u-blox 6 will have dramatically reduced power requirements thanks to new intelligent power management features, the company said. The innovations enable significantly extended battery life for power-critical GPS applications.

With the extension of the acquisition engine to more than 2 million correlators, the new chip exhibits stronger acquisition capability of weak signals and a shorter time to first fix. In addition to GPS, u-blox 6 is future-proofed for the upcoming new European satellite system Galileo.

u-blox 6 also supports the company’s proprietary YUMA GPS software and service, an instantaneous and low power location capture solution based on u-blox’“Capture & Process” technology. u-blox claims that Capture & Process is the lowest power solution for battery-powered applications such as tracking and photo geotagging.

First samples of GPS receiver UBX-G6010 single-chip and UBX-G6000/G0010 chipset will be available by the end of 2009 for customer evaluation, with the LEA and NEO GPS receiver module families upgraded shortly afterward. ANTARIS 4 and u-blox 5 family products remain fully supported.

“Moving on to u-blox 6 is an important milestone for u-blox and our customers as market demand increases for GPS solutions with high sensitivity, long battery life and instant location capture," said Andreas Thiel, executive vice president of R&D Hardware and co-founder of u-blox. "u-blox 6 based products will bring significant benefits to OEMs of real-time GPS products as well as to extremely low-power logger applications requiring weeks or months of battery life.”

Existing u-blox customers will benefit from the pin-to-pin compatible products, the company said. Key application areas for u-blox 6 based products include ultra-low power GPS loggers, asset and fleet management, people and animal trackers, automotive GPS black boxes, personal navigation and recreational devices, as well as cameras and camera phones with geotagging capability. u-blox 6 integrated circuitss will be available in standard and automotive grade versions.