OREANDA-NEWS. Sony Corporation announced the commercialization of two Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Receiver LSIs that achieve the industry’s lowest power consumption of just 10mW, and one GNSS Receiver Module for use in mobile products. These models are scheduled to be launched sequentially from June, 2013.

Location information is now widely used for purposes such as smartphone applications, and this functionality is now becoming integral to our daily lives. Examples include navigation services that guide us to our destinations, social network services that enable us to upload photos from travel destinations with location information, or mapping software that allows us to mark out the routes we have traveled. Functions that measure positional information are now available across a wide variety of products such as smartphones, tablets and digital cameras.

However, with the use of this functionality in mobile devices consuming? power and causing battery life to shorten, users are required to activate these functions accordingly. In addition, capturing positional information while indoors has also presented a challenge.

To overcome these challenges, Sony developed new RF and digital circuits, leveraging its extensive technologies and know-how in the area of tuner development. Specialized low-power AD converters, low noise amplifiers and electronic circuit phase-locked loops (PLL) have been developed for the RF circuits, and Sony also adopted a low-power digital circuit design that optimally controls the power supply and clock for each separate function block. Conventionally, the power consumption of the RF circuits alone exceeds 10mW, but Sony has successfully reduced power consumption to the industry’s lowest 10mW for the entire GNSS Receiver LSI unit.