Charles Abraham: Moore's Law and Correlator Counts
April 8, 2010 By: Alan CameronCharles Abraham is senior director of engineering, GNSS Business Unit, for Broadcom Inc. He draws an analogy between Moore's Law and correlator-count receivers.
In the early 1990s, receivers had a very small correlator count. For a receiver to detect a signal in the noise, it has to do a search, generally a two-dimensional search over code delays, over frequency. Depending on how many correlators it had, that search can take a very long time. The first receiver he worked with had only three channels, it had only two correlator taps per channel, and it would search serially over the space.
Things have changed. From a six-channel receiver within two years, to architectural changes in the late 1990s enabling changes even faster than Moore's Law. Later came receivers with massive parallel correlation, bringing capability to search for all satellites without any sequential search whatsoever. A new era for GPS: high-sensitivity receivers.
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