[SatNews] SkyTraq Technology Inc., a fabless GNSS positioning technology company, has introduced next generation Venus 8 platform which supports GPS, GLONASS, Beidou2, Galileo, QZSS, and SBAS. The Venus 8 doubles the search engine capability and reduces more than half the power consumption from the previous generation.
The Venus 8 integrates high performance GNSS signal-processing engine, low-power 32-bit RISC, IEEE-754 compliant FPU, cache memory, real-time clock, backup RAM, LDO regulator, switching regulator, GPIO, UART, SPI, I2C, ADC and all the necessary program ROM and data RAM on-chip for direct PVT solution with NMEA output in stand-alone GNSS applications. Using high-performance search engine and track engine architecture, the Venus 8 is capable of acquiring and tracking 167 satellites simultaneously, achieving fastest signal acquisition and TTFF in the industry. It achieves cold-start TTFF of less than 29 seconds and hot-start time of 1 second. The state-of-art performance brings satisfying user experience in all consumer GNSS applications
Having -165dBm tracking and -160dBm reacquisition sensitivity, the Venus 8 allows continuous navigation in nearly all environments, even under harsh urban canyon and highly attenuated dense foliage. Combining high-performance 7-stage pipelined 32bit RISIC and an FPU, the Venus 8 is capable of unprecedented high update rate of 50Hz for low cost consumer high dynamics applications.
The Venus 8 has very low current consumption of 6mA under continuous navigation. The initial Venus 8 product is in 5mm x 5mm QFN40 package. Drop-in evaluation module for GPS, GPS/GLONASS, GPS/Beidou2 applications are available in popular 12mm x 16mm, 13mm x 16mm, 17mm x 22mm form factors. Venus 8 related engineering sample, datasheet, and reference design are available in June. Volume production delivery to customer begins in August, 2013.
