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GPS Inside - April 2002

April 1, 2002 GPS World

Leica Partners with NovAtel for GPS

In a move that could have substantial consequences for the GPS marketplace, Leica Geosystems and NovAtel Inc. have executed a strategic cooperation agreement to develop high-precision GPS technology.

Under the agreement, Calgary, Canada–based NovAtel will immediately begin work to customize its existing GPS engines and components for Leica. Over the longer haul, the two companies say they plan to collaborate on developing new-generation technology, including equipment that uses the new civil GPS signals at the L2 and L5 frequencies and, possibly, Russia’s Glonass system and Europe’s proposed Galileo system.

For Leica, the deal makes a break with its past that since the mid-1980s had drawn on the former Magnavox commercial GPS technology and led to Leica’s acquisition of the Torrance, California–based Magnavox business in 1994.

For NovAtel, which has just reported a profitable 2001 fiscal year, the new alliance reaffirms the Canadian company’s strategic focus on core GPS signal processing techniques and related engineering challenges. Once new products “are rolling out over the next couple of years,” says NovAtel’s new president and CEO Jonathan Ladd, the company expects the Leica business to generate 15–20 percent of NovAtel’s revenues.

Ladd told GPS World that he does not expect the agreement with Leica to affect NovAtel’s joint venture with Sokkia in POINT, Inc. That company, established in1999 with 51 percent Sokkia ownership, draws on NovAtel engineering and technology to produce Sokkia-branded products for surveying, mapping, geographic information systems (GIS), construction, and machine-control markets.

The new agreement combines NovAtel’s OEM engineering with Leica’s formidable worldwide sales and distribution network for high-precision positioning equipment and related geospatial technologies. As of February 2002, Leica Geosystems, headquartered in Heerbrugg, Switzerland, employed 2,900 staff worldwide, including employees gained from several key acquisitions over the past year. Revenues at the end of the company’s last reported fiscal year (March 2001) were more than $400 million.

Although Leica has reportedly laid off more than a dozen staff members at its Torrance operation, the company will continue to concentrate on developing products and integrated solutions for surveying, monitoring, and GIS using high-accuracy GPS and other Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) technologies. This includes further development of algorithms for high-accuracy positioning, real-time kinematic (RTK) data capture, long-baseline processing, the creation of reference station networks, and data collection for GIS and machine-control applications.

“NovAtel brings a part of technology that we can reliably use together with our own concepts, and also has interesting strategic alliances in other GPS application areas. This will allow us to take profit from economies of scale and focus our resources on retaining and strengthening our competitive advantage in our areas and markets,” says Hans Hess, president and CEO of Leica Geosystems.

Founded in 1978, NovAtel has a substantial involvement in providing equipment for ground reference networks used in satellite-based augmentation systems in North America, Japan, Europe, and China. Its OEM products are used principally for applications in precision markets such as surveying, GIS, aviation, marine, mining, and machine control.

Chips, Deals, Dollars
SiRF Sails On

SiRF Technology has announced business developments in several key areas.

The San Jose, California-based provider of GPS technology is introducing two new chipset families — SiRFstar IIe/LP and SiRFstarIIt, aimed at integration into mobile consumer devices and automobile navigation systems.

The IIe/LP is designed for use in a modular environment in which host and GPS resources are not shared and the effect on system design is minimized. SiRF is targeting the IIt chipset for host-dependent environments in which GPS functionality is integrated directly onto the system motherboard, sharing host system processing and memory resources.

The new IIe/LP is a postage stamp–sized receiver that lowers the power requirements (to 60 mA) and increases the CPU throughput of the predecessor IIe chip by 55 percent, according to the company. The IIt hardware can reportedly be added to a host motherboard within an area as small as two square centimeters.

Both receivers include 12-channel CA-code tracking that generates up to 10 position fixes per second. Both chip families can also receive and process differential corrections and integrity messages from the GPS Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) under development by the Federal Aviation Administration. The IIe/LP also can receive radiobeacon differential GPS signals.

Among the first customers for the IIe/LP is Matsushita Electric Works (MEW), which has formed an alliance with SiRF to jointly develop and market products based on the new chipset. Some of the products will be used in theDoCoMo Location Platform from Japan’s NTT DoCoMo, one of the world’s largest telecom carriers.

SiRF also announced that Motorola will incorporate the IIe/ LP chip into its iDEN digital wireless phones to meet the Enhanced 911 mandate of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which requires carriers to be able to automatically provide the location of emergency callers to public safety answering points. In the United States, Motorola supplies the iDEN phones to Nextel and other carriers.

Finally, SiRF has announced the closing of a $19.6-million round of Series H financing. New corporate investors include MEW and Conexant Systems, Inc. SiRF also announced a previous receipt of strategic funding from several well-known companies, including Intel Corporation, Dell Computer, and Mobile Internet Capital, an affiliate of NTT DoCoMo. The funds will be used for future product development, increased production, and marketing activities in SiRF’s target markets: wireless handheld products, automotive, consumer electronics, and mobile computing.

In the United States, GPS-based vehicle navigation systems have moved from being an aftermarket item, to a dealer-installed OEM, to an OEM factory-line option, says Kanwar Chadha, SiRF’s vice-president of marketing. “Every time you make one of those shifts, you have a significant volume increase.”

Integration of GPS into mobile devices, such as cell phones and PDAs, is growing at the rate of 30–50 percent a year, he adds. “We expect that, by the end of this year, handset GPS will have volumes equal to the automotive sector.”

GPS competes with network-based location technologies, using techniques such as signal angle-of-arrival and time-difference-of-arrival calculations. However, accuracy and cost considerations may be pushing telecom service providers toward adopting network-assisted GPS solutions. “I’d be very surprised if, by 2004–5, all of the carriers are not on GPS," states Chadha.

Galileo Services Consortium

Eight European companies involved in various aspects of satellite technology have signed a memorandum of understanding to create Galileo Services, signaling their interest in future Galileo “downstream” business. The eight are Eutelsat SA (headquartered in France), France Developpement Conseil, Hispasat (Spain), Indra (Spain), Kongsberg-Seatex (Norway), Septentrio (Belgium), Telespazio (Italy), and Thales (France).

The Galileo Services members stated the Galileo program will enhance satellite navigation capabilities and encourage growth and development of the location-based services market. The companies expect to contribute to job creation opportunities offered by Galileo and public benefits in terms of added safety, cleaner air, and enhanced transport infrastructures.

The consortium stated its intent to sustain the Galileo program, fostering an “end to end” vision to fully respond to user and market needs, and to help develop value-added services fully exploiting all possible business potential.

New Thales Unit PBS-Centric

The Thales Group has announced creation of a new business group focusing on the development, sales, and implementation of positioning-based solutions (PBS). The new PBS group consists of three units: Thales Geosolutions, Thales Navigation, and Thales Telematics. In turn, these include, respectively, the brands (and recently acquired companies) of Magellan, Ashtech, and Orchid, with products and services in high-end precision surveying, other geoscience services, fleet-tracking and asset management.

Creation of the Thales PBS unit brings under one umbrella a range of activities in markets including oil and gas, telecoms and utilities, rail, road, and marine transport, mining, construction, and consumer recreation. With this regrouping, Thales signals the importance of the positioning and navigation markets in its overall strategic plan.

Stanislas Guérin, a senior vice-president in Thales’ aerospace business, will head the PBS group. Guérin joined the former French defense contractor Thomson-CSF in 1978 and held various management positions as the company grew, acquired U.K.-based Racal, transformed itself into Thales, and most recently acquired U.S. company Magellan.

Axiom Aligns With Traxsis

Axiom Navigation Inc. announced its acquisition of Burlingame, California-based Traxsis, a provider of software to locate mobile users connected to cellular networks.

Together, the companies will combine cellular tower triangulation with integrated GPS technology in cellular handsets to offer mobile users a variety of location-based services — including street directions, vehicle tracking, and providing the users’ location to emergency responders.

In a new combination cell phone replacement battery/location device, Axiom has integrated its compact GPS engine (SiRFstar II chipset) with Traxsis’ X-Pak cellular battery pack and X-GPS web-based location server technology. The device gives cellular users the ability to transmit their location, which is then viewable on a digitized map via the Internet. It also stores up to five hours of GPS data at a 1-Hz rate, or days or weeks of data at longer intervals.

Now in customer testing with the Nokia 5100 and 6100 handsets, X-Pak models for other manufacturers’ handsets are in development.

Axiom also plans to expand its fleet management systems product line as a result of the merger.

CMC Tapped For New AirSys

Technology Partnerships Canada, an agency of the Canadian government, announced a $16.9 million investment with CMC Electronics, Ltd., to launch a $56 million research and development initiative that will focus on advanced vision systems for navigation, aeronautical communication systems, and specialized GPS.

CMC Electronics will research and develop a specialized GPS receiver for ground stations with the potential to strengthen satellite-to-aircraft communications capabilities.

Thales Shanghai Shipping Pick

The city of Shanghai, China, selected Thales Navigation geodetic referencing receivers and software to monitor rivers and rain. The Ashtech Micro-Z Continuous Geodetic Reference Station and geodetic base station software will help Shanghai forecast monsoon rains and ensure shipping lanes in bustling Huangpu River and Hangzhou Bay remain adequately dredged.

The first 14 Micro-Z stations are currently being installed, with five more to come later this year. The stations also carry MET3 meteorological measurement systems from Edmonds, Washington-based Paroscientific, Inc. These will forward GPS and meteorological data every 30 minutes to a data processing center, to improve weather forecasting in a region prone to monsoon rains and flooding from May to September.

Ten area Micro-Z sites are equipped with radios to broadcast RTK and DGPS messages for high-accuracy real-time navigation, GIS, and survey applications.

Global Locate, Fujitsu Co-brand

San Jose, California-based Global Locate Inc. and Fujitsu Microelectronics America have jointly introduced a new low-power receiver enabling indoor GPS signal reception for wireless phones. The GL-16000 GPS baseband processor can reportedly acquire signals below 2158 dBm (decibels referenced to milliwatts).

The companies state that the baseband processor has 500 times more hardware correlators than a typical GPS receiver, with a time-to-first-fix of 250 milliseconds, and power requirement of less than 0.0005 percent of battery charge per fix. The GL-16000 can be combined with Global Locate’s GL-HSRF high sensitivity tuner device to form Global Locate’s IndoorGPS solution, or it can be used with other tuners.

Global Locate designed the Indoor GPS architecture, and in spring 2001 Fujitsu and Global Locate announced that Fujitsu would manufacture the GL-16000. The new agreement expands that collaboration to include co-branding and marketing activities in North America.

Applanix, Z/I Update POS AV

Z/I Imaging of Huntsville, Alabama and LH Systems, part of Leica Geosystems’ GIS and Mapping Division, have helped update Applanix’s Position and Orientation System for Airborne Vehicles (POS AV). POS AV provides data for geometric correction and geocoding of airborne sensors for photo surveying and mapping. Its direct georeferencing feature allows the determination of camera orientation parameters with minimal aerial triangulation and ground controls, enabling the rapid creation of digital orthophotos and maps.

Recently, Applanix added Z/I’s T-AS gyro-stabilized suspension mount interface to provide yaw drift control to the mount. POS AV’s real-time navigation capability enables automatic steering of the mount to follow a desired heading or the mean track angle.

LH Systems provides a similar mount interface that improves vertical stabilization and yaw/drift control: the PAV 30. It allows POS AV to receive Gimbal data to ensure precise positioning.

In other news, Applanix will provide two POS AV systems to the Aerial Image Centre of the National Land Survey of Finland.

Trimble Mini for Mobiles

Trimble has introduced a new ultra-low-power “mini” GPS receiver, the Lassen SQ module, designed to add GPS capability to a mobile device with minimal impact on size or battery life. According to the company, the Lassen SQ requires 100 milliwatts for continuous operation. Two penlight batteries can reportedly power the module for more than 40 hours. The unit measures 26 x 26 millimeters and incorporates Trimble’s FirstGPS technology with a microprocessor.

The integrated module consists of a miniature board with a GPS hardware core based on Trimble’s Colossus RF application- specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and IO-S digital signal processor (DSP) design, and a 32-bit central processing unit. It offers onboard data storage in flash memory .

The Lassen SQ module is compatible with active 3.3 VDC antennas; the company provides three models depending on the application. Trimble plans to make module and development kits available in the second quarter of 2002.

The company also announced an upgraded version of its AgGPS Autopilot DGPS system that eliminates the need for a base station and radio connection.

Parthus Technologies, Dublin, Ireland, announced total revenue growth from $31.9 million in 2000 to $40.9 million at the end of 2001. The company signed 25 licensing and royalty agreements and added 14 new customers including Sharp Microelectronics and Fujitsu. Parthus’ approach to the mobile-Internet market, “platform-level IP,” combines silicon and software intellectual property. Parthus IP is employed in wireless (Bluetooth, GSM/ GPRS), mobile computing (PDA, Smartphone for Microsoft, Linux), and key application IP (Java, GPS, multimedia) markets.

Calgary, Alberta, Canada-based NovAtel Inc. reported increased revenue and profits for 2001 in both the fourth quarter and for the entire year. Revenues for the year were up to $17.8 million from $15.6 million in 2000. A net income of $69,000 was reported for 2001, the company’s first year of profitability since 1997.

CSI Wireless Inc. announced that Colin Maclellan has joined the company as senior vice-president and general manager of the Wireless Business Unit. Most recently, he was vice-president, wireless Internet operations, at Nortel Networks, managing the company’s manufacturing activities for time division multiple access (TDMA) and code division multiple access (CDMA) technologies, Global System for Mobile communication (GSM), and Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) service.