GNSS Single Chip Improve Wearable Application Experience

How to really push the product design and technology development from the perspective of user needs from the user's use scenario is a matter that practitioners are currently worth taking the time to do. At the new technology conference held in the same period of CITE2014, Jerry Wang, business development director of Broadcom Mobile and Wireless Group's GPS department, said in an interview that the BCM4771, the GNSS SoC chip we recently introduced, is based on this The starting point for research and development.

Jerry said that about half of the wearable devices in the future will be equipped with global satellite positioning functions, mainly including sports, fitness and health care equipment. The market prospects are broad. For location tracker wearable applications such as healthy wristbands, the business model is built around data, because the accuracy of the data determines the user's experience and brand loyalty, so the quality of software algorithms and data collection and analysis tools is One of the most important factors to achieve product differentiation.

Jerry further analyzed that the BCM4771 allows users to download chip data received by global satellites from the server directly for the next seven days, which will result in faster positioning, increased accuracy, and increased sensitivity. Because this feature has already stored data in advance, you do not need to spend time looking for satellites. It takes about three to four seconds to set the position. The traditional one takes a minute or two, so Broadcom is very full on the one hand, and the GPS itself. The technology is used in wearables; on the other hand, we will develop our own sensor technology for five or six years, such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, etc., and have a close integration with GPS. The included sensor hub can integrate sensor input. Data, running algorithms on the chip, to detect the use of the situation, to accurately calculate the user's movement speed and distance, in addition to the user can continue to monitor the level of activity and historical location, in order to improve the measurement accuracy.

As the initial form of the product, power consumption and volume are also one of the major issues currently facing wearable devices. Compared with existing global navigation satellite system (GNSS) solutions, Broadcom reduces power consumption by 75% through chip architecture innovations and various power-saving technologies to meet the requirements of the wearable device market for extending battery life. "The BCM4771 integrates a low-power GPS and sensor hub to enable background positioning and fusion location processing on a single low-power GNSS chip, and Bluetooth and WiFi connectivity can be directly interfaced through this on-chip sensor hub. On-chip GNSS 'light' capability to implement a low-power hub that supports always-on background positioning and context awareness.” Jerry said, “In addition, the BCM4771 does not need to host AP (512KB) to participate and can store WiFi/Bluetooth background locations. Information and batch processing of location information not only saves power consumption, but also reduces design complexity and BOM costs and improves the user experience.”

Jerry also explained the details of the BCM4771's power reduction features in two cases for reporters. For example, GPS is searching every second, so it consumes power. However, in the use of wearable products, such as jogging, data does not need to be reported to the AP every second. It can accumulate a certain amount of data and report it once again. So we Designed specifically for the 4771, this feature stores up to one thousand position messages and reports them for ten minutes or twenty minutes to achieve power savings. For another example, GNSS generally integrates various systems including China Compass, US GPS, European Galileo, Russian GLONASS, and Japan's QZSS. As we all know, the more satellite systems consume more power, we will selectively integrate several of them based on user needs. The purpose of the satellite system is to ensure data saving while ensuring the accuracy of data monitoring.

Wearable devices can only solve some basic problems such as accuracy and power consumption, bring practicality to users, and combine innovative forms of expression. In this way, the so-called smart watch can only get out of the embarrassment of being not as good as a mobile phone.