Atmel and u-blox AG have jointly introduced ANTARIS 4, a GPS architecture said to combine low power consumption and high sensitivity performance in automotive GPS applications and portable GPS devices.

The architecture uses Atmel's 0.18 µm CMOS technology for the ATR0621 baseband and BiCMOS for the ATR060 RF-front-end. Power consumption is as low as 62 mW at a 1 Hz update rate in continuous tracking mode, which amounts to a 40% reduction in power consumption compared with the previous chipset. Power consumption can be reduced further in “FixNow” mode. Featuring up to -158 dBm tracking sensitivity, the ANTARIS 4 architecture requires fewer external components than its predecessor.