A BeiDou hardware receiver based on the STA8088 chipset

The recent release, in December 2012, of the complete BeiDou B1I Interface Control Document has boosted new interest and R&D activities in the field. For a manufacturer of GNSS semiconductor devices, the first and logical step in the roadmap toward a full blown BeiDou receiver is the reuse of existing and proven silicon; the new product can blossom and reach the market more quickly, with good overall performance, though not yet optimized in every single aspect. Following this approach, the paper describes a BeiDou receiver implementation, based on the STA8088 “Teseo-II” consumer chip, which was originally designed for GPS, Galileo and GLONASS. Several technical solutions adopted in the receiver are disclosed, including aspects of the RF path, signal processing and higher level software algorithms like GEO velocity computation and ionosphere models. The main difficulty encountered was the generation of the B1I ranging codes, which was accomplished, with some performance trade-offs, by reusing the on-chip Galileo programmable code memory. The final result is a compact, consumer grade BeiDou hardware receiver, suitable for navigation and timing applications. Static positioning plots from real data, collected at a roof antenna are also reported.