Fast Acquisition Unit for GPS/GALILEO Receivers in Space Environment

In contrast with ground applications the GNSS constellations are not optimized for space applications. Moreover, the different types of mission, i.e. Low Earth Orbit (LEO), Medium Earth Orbit (MEO), Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO), have all specific requirements. Our motivation is to define an «Ubiquitous GNSS receiver (UGNSS)», i.e. a single receiver able to cope with all types of mission. The analyze of the different types of mission shows that the UGNSS receiver should deal with both GPS and GALILEO signals as well as other future GNSS systems. It should also be able to have fast synchronization and robust tracking with extremely wide Doppler range (LEO mission) or be able to cope with very weak signals (GEO mission). In order to fulfill those requirements, we define the specifications of a reconfigurable decoder that allows to allocate the hardware resources to the type of processing required by the mission. In this paper we consider the algorithm which aims to acquire GNSS signals. This algorithm is based on two IP cores which perform a 8 points FFT and a 2048 points FFT. These two cores are configured to achieve GNSS signal acquisition in any space mission, by taking into account the signal structure (BPSK(1) or BOC(1,1)) and the signal features (C/No ratio, Doppler span and Doppler rate).