A complete single-chip GPS receiver with 1.6-V 24-mW radio in 0.18-μm CMOS

We have developed a complete single-chip GPS receiver using 0.18-μm CMOS to meet several important requirements, such as small size, low power, low cost, and high sensitivity for mobile GPS applications. This is the first case in which a radio has been successfully combined with a baseband processor, such as SoC, in a GPS receiver. The GPS chip, with a total size of 6.3 mm × 6.3 mm, contains a 2.3 mm × 2.0 mm radio part, including RF front end, phase-locked loops, IF functions, and 500 K gates of baseband logic, including mask ROM, SRAM, and dual port SRAM . It is fabricated using 0.18-μm CMOS technology with a MIM capacitor and operates from a 1.6-2.0-V power supply. Experimental results show a very low power consumption of, typically, 57 mW for a fully functional chip including baseband, and a high sensitivity of -152dBm. Through countermeasures against substrate coupling noise from the digital part, the high sensitivity was successfully achieved without any external low-noise amplifier.