June 13, 2007 — NemeriX (Manno, Switzerland), a fabless semiconductor company specializing in ultra low-power semiconductors and solutions for GPS and location-based service devices, and Bosch Sensortec Gmbh (Stuttgart, Germany), supplier of MEMS sensors for consumer markets, announce the successful integration of their technology to deliver a multi-sensing GPS solution. The new system promises significantly enhanced results for navigating urban stacked road systems, and multi-level bridges and tunnels.

The system integrates Bosch’s high-resolution SMD500 pressure sensor with NemeriX’s high-accuracy navigation solution, offering the ability to identify if a vehicle is traveling on the upper or lower levels in a multi-level or stacked road, and greatly enhancing turn-by-turn navigation in situations where traffic is traveling in the same direction on different levels of a road system, or where two-way traffic is accommodated.

By enabling fast and accurate determination of altitude in a way that is not possible simply by tracking a user’s speed or direction, the technology facilitates timely notification of approaching exits on stacked roads, and early detection of wrong exits when two roads are separating in almost parallel directions, but with different slopes.

Even with high-performance GPS systems, vertical accuracy is typically lower than the horizontal accuracy. This effect can be aggravated when the lower road is obstructed by the higher road, causing very high multipath that further degrades vertical accuracy. The Bosch-NemeriX collaboration enables vertical performance improvement to the level where a typical road-to-road vertical distance of 10 meters or more can be unambiguously resolved.

By combining high-resolution barometric air pressure measurement data with non-biased, lower resolution GPS-derived altitude, the two companies say they have delivered a solution to the altitude conundrum within performance, cost, size and power consumption parameters that have not been seen before.