Design and verification of search and tracking modules for a FPGA-based GPS receiver

GPS receivers constitute a topic of great importance since they have application in many fields of science and industry as geodesy, aviation, security and defense to name a few. The understanding of their internals, including the nature of the signals and the algorithms involved in their processing are crucial in the development of software defined receivers, which are the most common GPS receivers nowadays for custom applications. In this work, development and testing of search and tracking modules on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) is presented. Additionally, the need for such kind of receiver is presented along with a general architecture of the proposed system.