Keeping accurate time for a hybrid GPS receiver and mobile phone when powered off
AssigneesSeiko Epson Corporation, eRide, Inc.
InventorsPaul W. McBurney, Arthur N. Woo, France Rode
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A hybrid navigation satellite receiver and mobile telephone uses only two crystal oscillators. One that operates a master clock around 27-MHz and that consumes milliwatts of power. The other oscillator consumes only microwatts of power and operates continuously on battery power at about 32-KHz. Only the second, low frequency oscillator is kept running during power “off”. On power “restart”, a real-time-clock counter is consulted to cause an estimate of the GPS system time to be regenerated and supplied to the GPS-DSP to quicken its initialization. The master clock is GPS-calibrated, and the accurate clock is used to drive NCO's for the mobile telephone part and host CPU.
Claims7
An apparatus comprising:
- a global position system (GPS) navigation receiver part including:
- a GPS radio frequency (RF)-receiver, a GPS oscillator that provides a reference frequency to the GPS RF receiver, a low-frequency oscillator, a clock selector to select between the GPS oscillator and the low-frequency oscillator, a GPS-chip including a GPS digital processor for acquiring and tracking GPS satellite signals from the GPS RF receiver when connected by the clock selector to the GPS oscillator, and a numeric controlled oscillator (NCO) with a frequency output that can be compensated with GPS satellite time standard information derived during the tracking of said GPS satellites;
- a communications transceiver part having no crystal oscillator of its own by depending on frequency references provided over said NCO output, and including:
- a cellphone transceiver, a digital signal processor connected to the cellphone transceiver, a phone host CPU, a clock frequency divider connected to receive GPS-corrected frequencies from said NCO output instead of a communications VCO-crystal, and a voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) that receives a reference clock frequency output from the divider, and that provides a programmable synthesized reference frequency for the cellphone transceiver that has been compensated to GPS satellite time standards by values loadable into said NCO;
- wherein, at turn-on, the GPS-chip loads a default value for the phone host processor CPU into said NCO that will produce a startup processor clock, and thereafter a particular NCO output frequency can be requested by loading other values into said NCO;
- and
- wherein, the GPS receiver part provides for the compensation of NCO output frequencies by computing any error in the GPS oscillator to provide a compensated frequency to the VCO.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.