Ubiscale announces new customer for Cobalt, its low-power GNSS IP core

Cesson-Sévigné, France – March 9, 2022 – Ubiscale, announces today a new tier-1 customer for Cobalt, a GNSS receiving IP core supporting GPS, Galileo, and BeiDou as well as smart cloud assistance. The IP is optimized for battery powered IoT sensors, asset tracking devices and mass-market mobile products such as wearables, animals and goods trackers.

“Today, accurate & global positioning in IoT devices still represents a significant part of the bill-of-material and drive-up device size. Thus, many IoT applications are missing GNSS capability. Ubiscale’s technology solve the challenge to offer GNSS as simple software option. By integrating Cobalt, our customers can definitely supersize the market scope of their next-generation chipset for IoT and get GNSS capability with unprecedented low footprint and optimal cost” comments Samuel Ryckewaert, Co-founder and Business Development manager at Ubiscale.

Power optimization of GNSS signal processing is a sophisticated trade-off between sensitivity, accuracy, assistance and hardware requirements. For IoT devices, sensitivity is a key point because trackers suffer commonly from obstructed sky view, and small antenna. To address this constraint while keeping low power, Cobalt IP offers cutting-edge algorithms carved for IoT tracking scenarios with ultra-low MIPS & memory requirements. Additionally, Cobalt includes a software stack to support both legacy and advanced cloud assistance to further reduce Time-To-First-Fix and related power consumption.

The Ubiscale solution is also tailored to shared computational resources of existing cellular/LPWA modem. This capability allows to minimize drastically the area size and bill-of-material by avoiding external GNSS receiver and re-use modem components such as oscillator, memory & power converter.

“Leveraging flexible code architecture, Cobalt GNSS IP can be smoothly integrated to various environments, with or without OS” adds Mikaël Guenais, CEO at Ubiscale, “It allows system-on-chip designers to quickly integrate the IP and get GNSS capability with shortest time-to-market.”

The key features of the Cobalt GNSS IP include:

• Software-defined receiver with ultra-low MIPS & memory requirements
• Position Accuracy : < 2.5 m
• Galileo / GPS / BeiDou constellations with high sensitivity
• Cold-start and Cloud-assisted positioning for shortest time-to-first-fix
• Support of power-optimized cloud-assistance and legacy SUPL A-GNSS
• Support of continuous and snapshot (duty-cycled) operation
• Jammer mitigation

The Cobalt IP is available for demonstration on CEVA-DSP platform together with assistance over NB-IoT network.

About Ubiscale SAS

Ubiscale is a provider of innovative geolocation technologies to chip designers, device makers and IoT stakeholders. Since 2015, Ubiscale technologies has served millions of low-power trackers.

Leveraging a seasoned team coming from telecom and semi-conductor industries, Ubiscale delivers breakthrough solutions & services to make geolocation low-power and affordable to the mass-market Internet-of-Things applications. Ubiscale is headquartered in Cesson-Sévigné, France.