Patent ID: 7949035

Claim:
A method for locating a target cell among a plurality of cells corresponding to a GPS (Global Position System) signal, with the plurality of cells forming a two-dimensional array, wherein each row of the two-dimensional array corresponds to a code bin of the GPS signal and each column of the two-dimensional array corresponds to a frequency bin of the GPS signal, the method comprising: (1) providing a plurality of counters, each corresponding to one of the plurality of cells; (2) receiving the GPS signal in a unit of time in a detecting frequency bin; (3) decoding the received GPS signal with each of the corresponding code bins with respect to first cells corresponding to the detecting frequency bin to generate a corresponding decoding result in a decoding vector; (4) comparing each of the decoding results in the decoding vector with a threshold to update a corresponding counter with respect to one of the first cells in a two-dimensional counter vector; (5) repeatedly performing the steps (2)-(4) for a predetermined iteration if any of the corresponding counters exceeds a limit value; (6) determining whether the steps (2)-(4) have been performed for all of the plurality of cells; (7) filtering the plurality of counters to generate filtered results; (8) finding a most likely cell having a maximum value among the filtered results; and (9) setting the most likely cell to be the target cell for acquisition of the GPS signal.