engineering services needed - arm/pcb design

Hello,

I'm not in Chicago - or even US - so not a contender for this work.

I will suggest that for a commercial product you are likely to get a much better result if you get an experienced independent designer or design house to help you. It will cost more than someone moonlighting or just out of college but you stand a chance of getting a decent job.

Michael Kellett

we have. i have two eng firm quotes. thought id test the waters..

How about a SiGe SE4100 GPS RF front end + DSP? You can do better signal-to-noise filterings than the Sirf, as well as different frequency channels. With the EC and US releasing competiting GPS resolutions, you don't want to tie to the old resolution based modules.

At least two boards, with the RFs on a separate board, probably single-sided with solid plane on the other side.

If you are doing it for the US army, they will probably ask for the upgrading resolutions on both standards. Just in case they have to put solders in Europe. Oh, sorry, they already have.

thnx. ill look into it. no its not military intended, but worldwide marketplace intended.

There are a lot of modules out there that are much smaller than your form factor. They implement the full GPS function and communicate over a serial port. Some also provide software support so you can add your own code to the ARM CPU which is on most of them.

They are also very expensive, of the order of $200 each. The RF chip is about $20 + another $20 for a DSP. Of course, you have to do some programmings.

I am getting pricing between $100 for qty 1 to

I guess you work for a big company. We would not be buying 10k. One quote I got was:

Sample pricing is US$210.00 per unit

100 units for production = US$180.00 per unit 500 units for production = US$165.00 per unit

The RF chip could be less than $10 if you are buying 10K.

Yes, but the RF chip still requries the baseband chip and the ARM processor. To the best of my knowledge everyone still has a three chip solution. I guess there may be some who have combined the baseband processing with an ARM chip as a custom SOC solution, but I have not seen that yet.

Who did you get your quotes from? Check with uBlox or Fastrax. They seem to have the best modules at this point, at least in terms of size, power and cost. Pricing at 100 is $46 and at 500 is $34. uBlox has new modules that are indoor capable with 157dBm sensitivity rating. The price is only a bit more.

If you need contacts, I can send you mine.

Yes, that's a module with an embedded ARM. However, since getting the quote sometimes ago, we have designed not to go with the single chip solution. Since we need an FPGA on the board anyway, it could be decoding the 4MHz baseband as well.

The GPS is not needed all the time, so only the incremental costs are importannt. The FPGA is not part of the cost issue.

OK, I will check it out. Thanks.