The National Marine Electronics Association(NMEA) is nonprofit-making cooperation composed with manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers and educational institutions. It could be defined as the interface and data protocol regarding to the electronic signal for the communication among equipments on the sea, which is widely used protocol for the interfaces in such as marine equipment including depth recorder, alpha radar, ECDIS, and GPS receiver.
The equipment use a basic port in order to process the signal from equipment using NMEA signal. When port of equipment don't have enough, use the multi-port for processing. However, we need to have module development simulation which could multiplex and provide NMEA related signal that we could solve the problems in multi-port application and exclusive equipment generation for a number of signal.
For now, we don't have any case or product using NMEA multiplexor so that we import expensive foreign equipment or embody NMEA signal transmission program like software, using multi-port. These have problems since we have to pay lots of money and build separate processing part for every application programs. Besides, every equipment generating NMEA signal are from different manufactures and have different platform so that it could cause double waste and loss of recourse. For making up for it, I suggest the NMEA multiplexor embodiment, which could independently move by reliable process and high performance single hardware module, improve the memory efficiency of module by designing the optimized Queue, and keep having reliability for realtime communication among the equipment such as main input sensor equipment Gyrocompass, Echo-sound, and GPS.