u-blox将瑞士国家时间标准接入GNSS测试实验室

u-blox has integrated Switzerland’s UTC-traceable timing infrastructure directly into its GNSS test laboratory in Thalwil, the company announced September 3. The move gives the positioning and short-range communications provider continuous, in-house access to a nanosecond-accurate reference for validating GNSS timing receivers, cutting out the need for repeated trips to external metrology facilities. The integration was carried out with two Swiss partners: the Federal Institute of Metrology METAS, the country’s national metrology institute, and Switch, which operates Switzerland’s national research and education network. METAS realizes, maintains, and disseminates UTC(CH), Switzerland’s contribution to Coordinated Universal Time, and now provides u-blox with a continuous UTC-traceable reference through an unbroken, documented chain of calibrations. Switch carries that timing signal to the u-blox lab over its fiber-optic network using White Rabbit, an Ethernet-based synchronization technology. Why in-house timing validation matters GNSS timing receivers underpin a wide range of infrastructure that depends on precise, synchronized clocks — telecommunications networks, power grids, financial trading systems, and scientific instrumentation among them. Performance in that market depends on rigorous validation against a trusted UTC reference throughout development, and historically that has meant sending hardware out to external metrology labs or scheduling limited access windows. By building the METAS time service into its own laboratory, u-blox can now validate new hardware and software releases for its GNSS timing receivers on its own schedule. The setup also supports long-term timing stability measurements — tracking a receiver’s performance over weeks or months — against a continuously available, traceable reference, rather than relying on shorter test windows. Samuli Pietila, u-blox’s director of product line management for timing and infrastructure, said the infrastructure lets the company validate and continuously improve GNSS timing receiver performance directly in its own laboratory against a UTC-traceable reference. Jacques Morel, head of the laboratory for photonics, time and frequency at METAS, said the collaboration demonstrates how national metrology infrastructure can support industrial applications that require accurate synchronization and traceable validation against UTC. White Rabbit’s expanding footprint White Rabbit was developed at CERN to …