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The European GNSS Agency (GSA) had an important message for the recent 2019 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona: When close isn’t enough, use Galileo! The EU-funded NaviSoC project is doing just that, leveraging Galileo's dual-frequency GNSS signal to create a unique, high-precision receiver for mass market applications.

Much has been made of the potential of GNSS to enable new location-based services (LBS) that will profoundly change the lives of mass-market users and businesses. The NaviSoC navigation chip is a very small, multi-frequency GNSS receiver capable of combining Galileo, EGNOS, GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou, and QZSS signals to bring precision positioning to a wide range of devices.

The NaviSoC chip is fully integrated and offers unlimited access to raw GNSS data on any level. It can also be used in combination with an external inertial measurement unit (IMU) to complement its positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) function.

Read this: The GSA and Galileo at MWC Barcelona

"Our NaviSoC GNSS receiver is a semiconductor component meant to be integrated within bigger electronic equipment" said Tomasz Borejko, CEO of Polish company ChipCraft. "It is quite small, at 9mm by 9mm. So if somebody wants to integrate precise navigation in a smartwatch, they can put this chipset inside and they get a very precise position that they can display on a map, for instance."

Galileo first

Borejko's partner is Tomasz Radomski, owner of the INOWATRONIKA company, also based in Poland. Together, the two have created NaviSoC with support from the EU and the Polish government. "We are one of the first in the world to bring out a dual-frequency receiver," Radomski said. "This captures L1/L5 and E1/E5 bands on GPS and Galileo, along with the signals from all other major GNSS constellations."

"This is one of the main differentiators for our chip," said Borejko. "We are using Galileo signals on both frequencies, and that means Galileo is the primary constellation for this chip. Second, we add GPS and then Russian GLONASS and Chinese Beidou. But the chip starts with Galileo as the primary constellation."

"Galileo is our core," said Radomski. "Thanks to this, using our chip, you have better accuracy, below one meter, even down to 10cm, and you have a more robust and reliable position."
Some further details are worth noting; NaviSoC comprises a miniature GNSS receiver equipped with a multi-core 32-bit microcontroller (MPU), and it comes with a software development kit (SDK) that simplifies user application development.

"This feature really separates NaviSoC from other small GNSS receivers, and this can be very interesting for Internet of Things (IoT) applications and even for use in autonomous systems," Radomski said. The NaviSoC team assures us that, to date, no product of this kind has been brought to market. So this chipset offers manufacturers right now the chance to incorporate a genuine high-accuracy GNSS receiver into small, mass-market devices for navigation and positioning.

Ready for action

"We are the second company, after Broadcom, to bring a dual-frequency GNSS chip to market,” said Radomski. "Of course we know that competition is coming, there will be more companies offering dual-frequency, but we are ready and eager to compete with them, with our accuracy and with the lowest price."

And this: Qualcomm launches Snapdragon with dual frequency and 5G

Radomski said the NaviSoC team is now actively looking for customers. "We are in talks with several potential partners right now who want to use our chip. Some are interested in using it to create a module. Others are makers of end devices, end equipment. We are willing to sell to all customers who want our chips, from small companies who might need hundreds or a few thousand chips to bigger companies where we could be talking about millions."

“This kind of product until now has been unachievable on the market," said Borejko. "NaviSoC can be a market enabler for a future GNSS user segment, capable of bringing reliable, high-precision to mass-market users and applications, and taking the automation and autonomy of IoT devices to the next level.”

Galileo Masters winner

Obviously, someone agrees. NaviSoC won the 2018 Galileo Masters – Poland Edition Award, presented last year in Marseilles, in conjunction with the EU Space Week Conference. Borejko said that event went a long way towards stimulating even more interest in the new chipset: "We met many interesting people from the satellite navigation industry in Marseille, with whom we hope to maintain contacts and establish cooperation."

One person who has been following their progress closely is GSA Head of Market Development Fiammetta Diani. In the run-up to the Barcelona event, where the GSA shared a stand with NaviSoC and other EU-funded projects, Diani said: “According to the latest figures, today over 600 million devices – most of them the latest smartphone models – are now Galileo-enabled. Clearly, the time has come to make people aware that Europe’s investment in Galileo is bringing daily benefits to hundreds of millions!” NaviSoC is one such investment that appears to be poised to pay off in a big way.

Media note: This feature can be republished without charge provided the European GNSS Agency (GSA) is acknowledged as the source at the top or the bottom of the story. You must request permission before you use any of the photographs on the site. If you republish, we would be grateful if you could link back to the GSA website (http://www.gsa.europa.eu).

The European GNSS Agency (GSA) had an important message for the recent 2019 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona: When close isn’t enough, use Galileo! The EU-funded NaviSoC project is doing just that, leveraging Galileo's dual-frequency GNSS signal to create a unique, high-precision receiver for mass market applications.

Much has been made of the potential of GNSS to enable new location-based services (LBS) that will profoundly change the lives of mass-market users and businesses. The NaviSoC navigation chip is a very small, multi-frequency GNSS receiver capable of combining Galileo, EGNOS, GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou, and QZSS signals to bring precision positioning to a wide range of devices.

The NaviSoC chip is fully integrated and offers unlimited access to raw GNSS data on any level. It can also be used in combination with an external inertial measurement unit (IMU) to complement its positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) function.

Read this: The GSA and Galileo at MWC Barcelona

"Our NaviSoC GNSS receiver is a semiconductor component meant to be integrated within bigger electronic equipment" said Tomasz Borejko, CEO of Polish company ChipCraft. "It is quite small, at 9mm by 9mm. So if somebody wants to integrate precise navigation in a smartwatch, they can put this chipset inside and they get a very precise position that they can display on a map, for instance."

Galileo first

Borejko's partner is Tomasz Radomski, owner of the INOWATRONIKA company, also based in Poland. Together, the two have created NaviSoC with support from the EU and the Polish government. "We are one of the first in the world to bring out a dual-frequency receiver," Radomski said. "This captures L1/L5 and E1/E5 bands on GPS and Galileo, along with the signals from all other major GNSS constellations."

"This is one of the main differentiators for our chip," said Borejko. "We are using Galileo signals on both frequencies, and that means Galileo is the primary constellation for this chip. Second, we add GPS and then Russian GLONASS and Chinese Beidou. But the chip starts with Galileo as the primary constellation."

"Galileo is our core," said Radomski. "Thanks to this, using our chip, you have better accuracy, below one meter, even down to 10cm, and you have a more robust and reliable position."
Some further details are worth noting; NaviSoC comprises a miniature GNSS receiver equipped with a multi-core 32-bit microcontroller (MPU), and it comes with a software development kit (SDK) that simplifies user application development.

"This feature really separates NaviSoC from other small GNSS receivers, and this can be very interesting for Internet of Things (IoT) applications and even for use in autonomous systems," Radomski said. The NaviSoC team assures us that, to date, no product of this kind has been brought to market. So this chipset offers manufacturers right now the chance to incorporate a genuine high-accuracy GNSS receiver into small, mass-market devices for navigation and positioning.

Ready for action

"We are the second company, after Broadcom, to bring a dual-frequency GNSS chip to market,” said Radomski. "Of course we know that competition is coming, there will be more companies offering dual-frequency, but we are ready and eager to compete with them, with our accuracy and with the lowest price."

And this: Qualcomm launches Snapdragon with dual frequency and 5G

Radomski said the NaviSoC team is now actively looking for customers. "We are in talks with several potential partners right now who want to use our chip. Some are interested in using it to create a module. Others are makers of end devices, end equipment. We are willing to sell to all customers who want our chips, from small companies who might need hundreds or a few thousand chips to bigger companies where we could be talking about millions."

“This kind of product until now has been unachievable on the market," said Borejko. "NaviSoC can be a market enabler for a future GNSS user segment, capable of bringing reliable, high-precision to mass-market users and applications, and taking the automation and autonomy of IoT devices to the next level.”

Galileo Masters winner

Obviously, someone agrees. NaviSoC won the 2018 Galileo Masters – Poland Edition Award, presented last year in Marseille, in conjunction with the EU Space Week Conference. Borejko said that event went a long way towards stimulating even more interest in the new chipset: "We met many interesting people from the satellite navigation industry in Marseille, with whom we hope to maintain contacts and establish cooperation."

One person who has been following their progress closely is GSA Head of Market Development Fiammetta Diani. In the run-up to the Barcelona event, where the GSA shared a stand with NaviSoC and other EU-funded projects, Diani said: “According to the latest figures, today over 600 million devices – most of them the latest smartphone models – are now Galileo-enabled. Clearly, the time has come to make people aware that Europe’s investment in Galileo is bringing daily benefits to hundreds of millions!” NaviSoC is one such investment that appears to be poised to pay off in a big way.

Media note: This feature can be republished without charge provided the European GNSS Agency (GSA) is acknowledged as the source at the top or the bottom of the story. You must request permission before you use any of the photographs on the site. If you republish, we would be grateful if you could link back to the GSA website (http://www.gsa.europa.eu).

For the European GNSS Agency (GSA), the success of Galileo is to be gauged in part in terms of its uptake within the location-based services (LBS) market. The EU-funded FLAMINGO project is unleashing the potential of GNSS, leveraging the dual-frequency Galileo signal for improved LBS performance in the urban environment.

The objectives of the FLAMINGO project are to develop and deliver high accuracy and reliable positioning and navigation services for mass market uptake. The project team is demonstrating the power of Galileo's dual-frequency signal by developing and showcasing ready-to-market applications on both smartphone and IoT devices within major European cities, all while fostering a new community of EGNSS consumers and applications.

William Roberts is Operations Manager at the UK's NSL and FLAMINGO project coordinator. Speaking at the 2019 Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, he said, "FLAMINGO is showcasing the near future by enabling and demonstrating high-accuracy positioning and navigation.

"What we are doing is using the GNSS raw measurements that Google are providing at their API [application programming interface] level 24 onwards, to provide high-accuracy services directly onto your standard, standalone smartphone. There are data services behind it, but essentially the user of a smartphone can get down to about 50 cm accuracy."

Read this: LBS user requirements highlighted in GSA special report

Roberts describes the service as a hybrid RTK- and PPP-type solution, using survey techniques within a smartphone. "The limiting factor is really the smartphone itself, the electronics in there. The antenna is buried within the phone, for example, and things like that. So it's not exactly an ideal survey instrument, but still you can get down to several decimetres of accuracy, which opens up a host of fairly interesting markets, from survey to augmented reality-type applications."

The Galileo difference

Roberts said the European satellite navigation system, Galileo, is a key enabler for the FLAMINGO solution, "because it gives you more satellites, which means better availability, but also the new second frequency."

Traditionally, mobile, location-based applications have been powered by single-frequency GNSS receivers operating under stringent battery-power and footprint constraints. With dual-frequency GNSS capabilities, any smartphone can benefit from better accuracy, ionosphere error cancellation, improved tracking and better multipath resistance, so important in an urban setting. Indeed, making a big splash at MWC 2019 were some brand-new, dual-frequency-enabled smartphone models from Chinese manufacturer Xiaomi, the Mi8 and the top-of-the-line Mi9.

"With this dual-frequency capability that we see here at MWC, with the Xiaomi devices, for example, it gives you a far, far better tracking on the L1 band," Roberts said.

Joining Roberts at the FLAMINGO display was Joshua Critchley-Marrows, also of coordinating partner NSL. He said, "I think one of the big differentiators for us is we're targeting mass-market app developers. They can simply add FLAMINGO to their application and they are immediately delivering a more accurate positioning service. This allows things like augmented reality.

And this: EU Space enables an interconnected future

"I'll use an example like a 'laser shooter' game," Critchley-Marrows said. "If you've got some kids pointing their phones at each other and shooting, you need that centimetre accuracy to essentially shoot your friends! Or if you've got a smartphone in the street and you need to identify the cafe that you're trying to get to, you need that below-one-metre accuracy. You might not need ten centimetres or five centimetres, but as long as you've got sub-metre you can probably pinpoint where that shop front is."

"So we're basically enabling a whole new range of apps," said Roberts. "Our FLAMINGO is an app plus an API for developers. So they can simply start FLAMINGO and then start slivering positions, with no knowledge of GNSS.
Widening the community of developers

"One of the things we're going to do at some stage over the next year, it's not confirmed exactly when, is to actually run hackathons, but for the non-GNSS community," Roberts said. "So we want to get people who are app developers who have some form of location-enabled application that they are developing, but they are not GNSS people. That's very important to try and reach out to the wider community and get people here using this. We don't want people to just see GNSS location as a finished product, but instead to use is for more and different kinds of services and solutions."

The FLAMINGO project was on display at MWC in Barcelona thanks to the GSA, which was sharing its space with a select group of excellent EU-supported initiatives using Galileo to bring innovative solutions to the marketplace. "The GSA is all about reducing the time to market and the time to develop a product," Roberts said, "so it gives small companies like ourselves the opportunity to develop new products and new solutions."

"Working within an EU framework has also been great in terms of developing collaborations," Critchley-Marrows said. "We are actually working together with companies across Europe, rather than just trying to compete." Indeed, FLAMINGO involves nine leading European organisations, including five SMEs, all specialised in location technology.

The project represents exactly the kind of innovative, market-oriented initiative that the GSA wants to continue to support and to see succeed, bringing 'the Galileo difference' to the widest possible user market.

Media note: This feature can be republished without charge provided the European GNSS Agency (GSA) is acknowledged as the source at the top or the bottom of the story. You must request permission before you use any of the photographs on the site. If you republish, we would be grateful if you could link back to the GSA website (http://www.gsa.europa.eu).