NSF Award
1449006
The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is to provide more efficient GPS-based location awareness for next-generation devices. Within the last 20 years, GPS devices have shrunk from brick-sized receivers to cell phones, wrist-watches, and pet collars. This project introduces a transformative approach to GPS tracking that will greatly lower the average power consumption. This will allow for GPS tracking devices that can last weeks on a single small battery. There would be a tangible societal benefit in many aspects of commerce and day-to-day life: compact freight tracking tags can ensure shipments do not get lost; embedded merchandise and asset tags can track stolen items and alert authorities to its location; hikers and search and rescue can rely on portable navigation devices that lasts weeks on a single charge; personal fitness devices can track fitness goals over days and weeks instead of hours; law enforcement can use GPS tags to safely track suspects from a distance; cell-phones can provide always-on background GPS positioning, allowing apps to expand their capabilities. All of these benefits, and more, are realizable with the proposed 100 uW GPS platform.<br/><br/>This Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR) Phase I project establishes the feasibility of a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver microchip that provides continuous real-time positioning and timing at 100 uW average power - a 10x improvement over the current state-of-the-art. The proposed techniques leverages state-of-the-art advances in radio-frequency (RF) and baseband hardware design that can benefit many aspects of receiver research and design. The microwatt-scale crystal oscillator allows more for accurate timekeeping in an RF system when the RF unit is off. This can lead to smarter RF protocols that wake-up exactly when needed to transmit or receive. The fast start-up front end technology can also benefit devices that employ time-multiplexing frequency sharing schemes. The platform could allow for a clocks that are synchronized to microsecond accuracy across all devices in a geographic area. This opens new avenues of research in wireless sensor network synchronization and communication protocols. Further research could investigate a non-GPS source of synchronization as well for indoor use: the proposed approach would work if a local node were instead broadcasting a. These local nodes could themselves synchronize with GPS through an external antenna, leading to complete indoor and outdoor synchronization of a wireless sensor network.
