Implementation of a GPS Searcher for 3G Cellular Technology

Texas Instruments Engineering, 2000-01

Liaison(s): Edwin Park, Karim Abdulla
Advisor(s): David Harris
Students(s): Fernando Mattos (TL), E-Hwa Chung, Drakos McGuire, Jeffrey Miller

The Clinic team developed a VHDL searcher that correlates GPS signals and reports the available satellites to a CPU. The team modified Texas Instruments’ (TI) searcher for CDMA base stations in order to reuse the already existing hardware as much as possible. The first step of the project was to focus on developing mathematical models for GPS signals and the searcher, and to set up the interface equipment necessary for the hardware implementation. Finally, the team modified TI’s VHDL code to support GPS satellite searching. After initial software simulation, the team integrated the VHDL code into FPGAs for hardware demonstration and for testing with a larger amount of test vectors.