Real-time Carrier Generation for a GNSS Software Receiver

The growing market of GNSS capable mobile devices is driving the interest of software receiver solutions as they can share many resources with other system units, reducing both the size and the cost of their integration. However, a major issue with the software approach is the large computing resources required for the base-band processing and the carrier generation in particular. Several strategies have been proposed in the literature to overcome it, but they still suffer from their lack of flexibility and large memory requirements. In this context, IMT has developed a completely new receiver architecture for optimizing the processing resources of the base-band operations and the carrier generation especially. The general concept consists in batch processing the incoming samples for progressively reducing the data throughput, and consequently the global amount of arithmetic operations. This method not only allows the real-time generation of the carrier at any desired frequency but also greatly simplifies the further mixing operations with the incoming signal.