It seems that Nokia's Dr. Jari Syrjärinne may well the be inventor of ME-PE Interface judging by the publications he's authored and information he's given out in public, and the patent application (see below) "Managing the Measurement of Signals".
On Monday 23 August 2010 Matti J. Aaltonen matti.j.aaltonen@nokia.com , a Nokia employee, posted "[PATCH RFC 0/1] MISC: Broadcom BCM4751 GPS driver" and "[PATCH RFC 1/1] MISC: Broadcom BCM4751 GPS driver" to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML). The driver - bcm4751-gps.c - was just a kernel shim that interfaced to the hardware and allowed an (unpublished, proprietary) library to communicate through the kernel with the BCM4751.
Unsurprisingly the kernel developers were not impressed, especially when they were told they'd need to sign a legal agreement in order to get a copy of the MEIF protocol specification, and declined it with cynicism.
Biography:
M.Sc. degree in technical mathematics in 1984 from the Technical University of Tampere. Following completion of the M.Sc. degree, he spent five years at the Technical University of Tampere working at the department of mathematics. From 1989 he has been working at the Technical Research Centre of Finland as a Research Scientist. His main interests are in user interface and graphics programming. Co-author of "Two Approaches to Bringing Internet Services to WAP Devices" presented at the 9th International WWW conference.
Matti appears to focus on Linux kernel contributions for Nokia and would probably have little to no knowledge of the MEIF protocol.
Co-Founder and CEO of Global Locate, Inc., now Senior Technical Director, Broadcom.
"The cellular industry standards are sometimes an impenetrable alphabet soup of changing acronyms, and I am deeply indebted to Javier de Salas (Broadcom), and Dr. Jari Syrjärinne (Nokia), for contributing everything good about industry standards in Chapter 9, including the description of the ME-PE architecure and interface."
Source: A-GPS: Assisted GPS, GNSS, and SBAS, Frank van Diggelen, Artech House, 2009. ISBN-13: 978-1-59693-374-3. Page xvii.
jari.syrjarinne@nokia.com
LinkedIn profile
- development of non-GPS positioning technologies (WiFi/Cell-ID positioning)
- managing the evolution of A-GPS/A-GNSS services e.g. supl.nokia.com
Patent: WO 2010037416 A1: 2008-10-01, Nokia Corporation, Managing the Measurement of Signals List of patents {Patentmaps}
Nokia Research Center publications
2007-10-11: Swedish Radio Navigation Board presentation A-GNSS for Mobile Terminals {PDF}
Inside GNSS Articles
...Nokia has taken the lead and defined a specification between GNSS hardware and GNSS software called the Nokia GNSS Measurement Engine Interface (MEIF).
Nokia MEIF aims to introduce a common low-level GNSS hardware interface for the mobile handset/GNSS industry allowing flexible feature and GNSS support. For the first time it is now possible to converge into a common GNSS hardware message interface which gives all receivers the same baseline upon which to test and compare the performance under the same conditions: for example, to qualify sometimes very unprecedented sensitivity and accuracy figures. A common interface also makes it possible for the handset manufacturers to use multiple chipset vendors and, if required, to easily change from one vendor to another without considerable modification to the handet software and software interfaces.
The initial version of Nokia MEIF specification (v 1.0) was released to Forum Nokia in November 2006. It very quickly gained a lot of popularity and currently (12 months later) there are already more than 10 licensees, and the number is still growing fast.
Nokia MEIF does not strictly dictate any specific receiver architecture, but merely defines the logical message interface between real-time and non-real time functions of the GNSS receiver. However, the recommended partitioning is for a measurement engine (ME) hardware chip and positioning engine (PE) software running on the host processor. This partitioning might change in the future due to pressure to integrate GNSS hardware with other radio technologies.