SE4150L-R being discontinued

[Onion2222]

Hello,
I just read that the GNSS receiver IC is being discontinued.
As this project is very innovative and start to become a must-have for wildlife science, I am concerned about the availability of components.

• Do you have any plan to change this IC ? I read a paper about some equivalence (but I don't have enough technical knowledge to change the design by myself !)
• Also, do you think there is still enough parts for the next months ?

Thanks a lot for this incredible work and for your help.

[JonasBchrt]

Hi @Onion2222 and thanks for your interest as well as posting here!

We currently do not plan to replace the GNSS receiver IC, at least not right now. There are a few reasons for that. Firstly, the current chip (SE4150L) has a few technical advantages over other chips, e.g., the Maxim MAX2769 GPS that Eichelberger et al. used for their work. The SE4150L has a lower power consumption, is simpler to integrate into a design, and operates on 3.3 V, which is the same supply voltage as the one of the microcontroller. Maybe more important right now are the non-technical advantages, though. The SE4150L is much cheaper (one IC costs about $1) and it is available to source in almost arbitrary quantities. The MAX2769 might not be discontinued, but it seems to be much harder and more expensive to get the hands on this one. So, currently I do not see any IC that would be a better fit for the low-cost SnapperGPS project. But if you come across one, feel free to give me a shout.
In the long run, a replacement might be desirable and I do not see any massive hurdles on the way. For our originally SnapperGPS paper from 2021, we successfully used data from different front-ends already; so, there is at least nothing on the software-side that mandates the use of the SE4150L.

Regarding the second question: I certainly cannot claim to be able to predict the market for electronic components right now, but I am less concerned about the SE4150L. Currently, all components are available, I just placed a few smaller orders over the past couple of weeks. However, the TCXO and the MCU trade at much higher prices right now than they were used to. That is what annoys me right now.

If you have follow-up questions or would like to discuss something specific to a project, feel free to continue this thread.