Feature article: High sensitivity acquisition of GNSS signals with secondary code on FPGAs

The modern global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) signals, such as the Global Positioning System (GPS) L5 and L1C, and Galileo E5 and E1, have brought several innovations: the introduction of a pilot channel that does not contain any data to allow very long coherent integrations; the introduction of a secondary code to offer better cross-correlations, to facilitate the synchronization with the data, and to help interference mitigation; the introduction of new modulations to reduce the impact of multipath; and the use of higher chipping rates to have better accuracy and interference mitigation.