Advanced autonomous driving, among others, needs precise satellite-based positioning services. It is well known that high rise buildings and weather conditions hinder the precision of satellite navigation. Even with the new Galileo satellites, these effects are still detrimental of high precision. Therefore, to improve the accuracy of these GNSS, Albora Technologies and UPC’s VirtuOS research group joined hands.

Albora Technologies is an SME that develops novel GNSS processing mechanisms with increased reliability, sensitivity and precision. Embedding these functionalities into hardware requires a precise evaluation of the hardware resources needed before prototyping takes place. UPC’s VirtuOS research group has been developing emulation and virtualization platforms (including SoCs) for more than 10 years. Part of their knowledge is now commercially exploited through the Ludium Lab start‐up and the cross‐platform online gaming platform (Sorastream).

Thanks to this collaboration, funded by Eurolab4HPC, UPC adapted the core infrastructure of emulation to a GNSS SoC. In particular, the novel infrastructure is able to quantify the GNSS application building blocks in terms of data intensity, timing requirements and computation needs. In addition, the transferred virtual SoC will allow the SME ALBORA TECHNOLOGIES to perform a fast evaluation of their future platforms without the need of the real hardware.