For the designer tasked with the development of a telematics platform or any other GPS based application, there are many detailed options to evaluate. Also, for management, there are important longer-term strategic and financial implications to consider carefully.
The decisions made at the outset can seriously affect the ultimate performance, time to market, reliability and therefore the revenue achieved by the final product.
With GPS rapidly becoming an increasingly vital part of our businesses and private lives, the market for these devices has seen a strong and steady business growth. Apart from traditional GPS applications, such as navigation and car breakdown emergency systems, GPS functionality has expanded well into the industrial and business markets. Similarly, many industrial products developed today implement accurate positioning and, very often, intelligent data communications.
The area of telematics applications using GPS is widely reported to be a potentially huge market with a growing diversity of applications to provide an advantage over the competition for many commercial operations and organisations. It can be easily implemented anywhere where data is needed on the move, particularly in the burgeoning area of fleet management where remote information is required concerning, for example, location, speed, control settings, instrument readings or environmental conditions; quite literally, anything that can be detected, monitored or measured, can be transmitted as data for analysis to a desired central hub or location for analysis and processing.
For designers and manufacturers of telematics systems, the decision to choose either the chipset or modular route is crucial to the bottom-line or profitability of the final product. Often, when volumes are not huge, the basic information in the form of rough block diagrams and data sheets, usually provided by the chipset suppliers, isn't enough to give designers the necessary help in getting a design up and running quickly and into production. Designers are often left high and dry, having to figure out solutions to the normal design problems encountered, using highly specialised and expensive equipment, while under extreme pressure to deliver a successfully manufacturable product design.
Also, the financial costs experienced in chipset-based development of these systems can be daunting. In medium volumes, the bill of materials (BOM) can be unacceptably high.
These aspects need to be considered very carefully and are of significant importance to all elements of the design and business development for the final product. The large up-front investment in the specialised test equipment and software investment required together with the sometimes lengthy and arduous qualification of the functional block GPS (see Fig. 1) put great pressure on the design and financial management teams within a company.
To compound problems, the purchasing of a larger BOM including the more exotic components such as the TCXO, saw filter and LNA, which are available only from specialist suppliers with long lead times and high prices, is another headache – even for medium volumes.
Purchasing departments given the task of assembling a cost plan for the BOM just cannot achieve the leverage of volume ordering discounts – especially with the specialised component suppliers who give the sought-after discounts and preferential delivery schedules to their more lucrative, high volume tier-one customers.
These are precisely the areas that are addressed with ready-made state-of-the-art products such as GPS modules, smart GPS antennas and advanced telematics platforms: they enable engineers and mid-size companies to develop and implement GPS functionality easily into their systems with the advantages of simplified design with low risk, reduced financial investment and, therefore, faster time-to-market. All the specialised and usually highly expensive RF design, qualification and test processes are done. The module or platform becomes virtually plug and play.
Future-proofing and upgrading of end products is quite easy as suppliers tend to listen to the demands of the markets with a strong emphasis on compatibility for next generation products. While reduced size is another strong demand, this requires at least a redesign, but goes hand-in-hand with a new end product generation, see Fig. 2.
While devices designed and manufactured for consumer applications need to be very compact, other industries put their emphasis on reliability and quality, long-term availability of products, and manufacturing characteristics that allow for 100% visual inspection during assembly. Further, all applications are driven by the need for ever higher GPS sensitivity along with lower power consumption. The life cycle of GPS products decreases as leaps in technology enable more features and higher levels of performance to be achieved. The manufacturing company must therefore be able to upgrade its product family in unison with these technology advances to maintain market acceptance.
GPS chipsets are available that can rapidly acquire satellite signals and maintain a solid signal-lock, even in intensely built-up urban districts or densely covered forest environments.
These can be combined with a smart antenna to create a highly integrated GPS antenna receiver module based on the proven technology of a GPS receiver module and a ceramic GPS patch antenna (see Figs. 3 and 4). An RF switch integrated on the module could allow changing of RF input from the on-module antenna to an external antenna. Such a module can receive signals from up to 20 GPS satellites and transfer them into position and timing information that can be read over a serial port.
The important decision for any company entering the market, hinges on its confidence in the anticipated volumes, equipment and expertise and, importantly, the level of acceptable risk in which it is prepared to make investment. The volatility and highly competitive nature of the business in these turbulent times make the low cost-of-ownership and a safe, early market entry offered by the module route, a pragmatic choice.
Hans Wiedemann is manager of product marketing for Vincotech