Area-Efficient Universal Code Generator for Multi-GNSS Receivers

Although conventional global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) receivers were originally designed for single signals, studies on multi-signal receiver design have recently been actively conducted to achieve high accuracy, precision, and reliability. However, in order for a multi-signal receiver to support various codes, the receiver should support the generation of individual codes. Therefore, the resulting problem of increased complexity must be solved. This paper proposes a hardware structure for an area-efficient linear feedback shift register (LFSR)-based multi-frequency universal code generator. Whereas the existing universal code generators were configured so that feedback polynomials, output registers, and initial values can be selected by placing read-only memories (ROMs), multiplexers (MUXs), and exclusive ORs (XORs) by register bit, in the case of the proposed universal code generator; the circuit was implemented by applying the hardwiring technique to those register bits that have fixed values. According to the results of field programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation, the proposed LFSR-based universal code generator can improve look up table (LUT) by up to 37% and register by up to 78% when compared to conventional code generators, and LUT by up to 36% when compared to the previous universal code generator. Therefore, the proposed universal code generator is a good candidate for implementing multi-frequency receivers to achieve high precision and high reliability.