Feature article: High sensitivity acquisition of GNSS signals with secondary code on FPGAs

Jerome Leclere, Cyril Botteron, Pierre-Andre Farine
2017 IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine  
The presence of a secondary code in modern global navigation satellite system signals complicates the acquisition of these signals, because there is a potential sign transition between each period of the primary code. Some previous works proposed to use the parallel code search by performing the correlation over the primary code several times and then combining the results according to the secondary code chips. In this article, we will focus on this method and compare different hardware
more » ... tations, to determine if it is better to do the combinations before or after the correlations, and to compare serial and parallel architectures. In a second part, we will show a simple method that manipulates the local secondary code to rearrange the equations, which approximately halves the theoretical number of operations related to the secondary code correlation and the processing time for hardware implementations, without any impact on the sensitivity.
doi:10.1109/maes.2017.160176 fatcat:3snc55pcjjadvkjgcwhjcchxxq