Finalist EPFL doctorate Award 2017 – Saeed Ghamari
© 2017 Saeed Ghamari
Special distinction from the selection committee to Saeed Ghamari for his thesis « CMOS ASIC Design of Multi-frequency Multi-constellation GNSS Front-ends ".
Thèse n° 7045 (2016).
Thesis directors: Prof. P.-A. Farine, Dr C. Botteron
With the emergence of the new global navigation satellite systems (GNSSs) such as Galileo, COMPASS and GLONASS, the Global Positioning System (GPS) is no longer the sole player in satellite navigation systems. These new systems offer not only new services but also new frequency bands and signal structures, and challenge engineers to exploit them.
One of these services is the European Galileo PRS which is a proprietary encrypted navigation service that is designed to be more robust and reliable, with anti-jamming and pseudo-random number (PRN) encryption mechanisms. This service provides position and timing to a specific group of users, authorized governmental bodies, who require a high continuity of service. The PRS as a new service demands a class of advanced front-ends (FEs) that can satisfy its stringent requirements. In this thesis an ASIC PRS FE is developed to respond to the growing need for low-cost multi-frequency radio modules adapted for professional applications.
Furthermore, to address civilian applications and exploit the interoperability among GNSSs, this thesis also presents a low-cost reconfigurable single-channel FE. The FE offers two configuration modes that can accommodate simultaneous reception of Beidou-B1,GPS-L1 and Galileo-E1 signals.