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Mahesh

30/09/23 06:32 AM IST

India’s NavIC will now be supported by ‘Made in India’ chipsets

In News
  • For the first time the chipsets or microchips which are capable of receiving and processing the signals of the indigenous navigational system NavIC will be designed and manufactured in India by an Indian company.
Significance
  • Not all smartphones and navigational gadgets (or navigators) are compatible with NavIC.
  • To use and decode NavIC signals, a navigating gadget should have a NavIC compatible chipset or microchip incorporated inside it.
  • Ministry of Science & Technology and Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, the two ministries of the Government of India, are jointly collaborating with a Hyderabad based firm, - Manjeera Digital Systems Private Limited, to facilitate the designing and commercial production of these chips in India.
  • The company has designed baseband processor chip that uses indigenously developed Universal Multifunctional Accelerator (UMA) processor IP, which has ability to receive, read and process the NavIC signals.
  • These chipsets will soon go into large-scale commercial production.
  • The initiative is not only a testament of the indigenization of state-of-the-art technologies but also a morale booster for public-private partnerships in the country.
Manjeera Digital Systems
  • Manjeera Digital Systems is a fabless semiconductor company with a patented High Performance Computing (HPC) processor called UMA.
  • This home-grown product enables navigation as well as tracking and can be used for both commercial and civilian purposes.
  • In the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, the initiative is supported by the Technology Development Board.
About NaVIC
  • NavIC has been developed by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).
  • It is a constellation of seven satellites and a network of ground stations operating round the clock.
  • Three satellites of the constellation are placed in geostationary orbit and four satellites are placed in inclined geosynchronous orbit.
  • NavIC’s coverage currently includes India and around 1,500 km beyond India’s boundaries. NavIC signals are interoperable with the other global navigation satellite system (GNSS) signals namely GPS, Glonass, Galileo and BeiDou.
  • The Glonass system has been developed by Russia, Galileo by the European Union and BeiDou by China.
  • The most important driver behind India developing NavIC was to reduce dependency on GPS and other global navigation systems which are controlled by other countries.
  • For those unaware, the United States which owns and controls GPS prevented India from using the technology during the Kargil war in 1999, making it difficult for India to identify the positions taken by Pakistani troops.
  • In addition to this, NavIC uses dual bands to offer improved accuracy and positioning.
  • As per ISRO, NavIC is expected to offer a positional accuracy of 5 metres, compared to 20 to 30 metres offered by GPS.
Source- PIB

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