NavIC RF Frontend

Dhruva: A Universal Navigation Receiver Front-end

In the era of smart devices and IoTs, navigation is one of the essential features that we use in various commercial and personal applications. It has changed the way we travel from one place to another, the way we explore an unknown neighborhood. This is the technology that drives your Ola/Uber to the desired destination and facilitates the delivery of food to your home from a restaurant. This technology finds its way in aerial, marine navigation too and it aids nations in surveying their territories, secure their borders, and manage disaster response. 

A navigation system includes constellations of Earth-orbiting satellites. Each of these satellites continuously transmits its position and time reference using radio waves. The navigation receivers capture these signals, amplify them and further process in the digital domain. Each receiver then determines its own position accurately based on the trilateration method using the signals received from multiple satellites. 

Numerous nations have already deployed their own navigation satellite systems, like the United States' Global Positioning System (GPS), Russian Federation's Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS), Europe's GALILEO, China's Bei-Dou and Japan's Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS). India indigenously developed its own navigation system, Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS), or Navigation with Indian Constellation (NAVIC), to reduce its dependency on foreign navigation systems and to be self-reliant in this technology. 

We designed “Dhruva,” a navigation receiver RF front-end integrated circuit (IC, chip) primarily targeted for Standard Positioning Service (SPS) in civilian applications provided by NAVIC and GPS. Since the satellites are far away from the Earth (Ex, NAVIC 36,000 km), the received signals are extremely weak compared to the ambient noise. This chip can clean up all the interfering signals, sifting out the weak desired navigation signals. These are then amplified by approximately 400,000 times before converting to digital bits using on-chip Analog-to-Digital. This project is funded by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), India. The team has been interacting with SAC-ISRO for specifications for the IC. Going forward, the plan is to develop an advanced version of Dhruva with many additional features and a substantially smaller footprint. Once the Indian government mandates the use of NAVIC for mobile and commercial applications, Dhruva can be integrated into commercial implementations.