Javad Ashjaee (Photo: Javad GNSS)

Javad Ashjaee, founder of JAVAD GNSS, has died in Moscow, Russia. He died on May 30 after a three-week fight with COVID-19.

The news was first reported by a family member on social media. Ashjaee was born in 1949.

“It is with heavy hearts that we share the news of the passing of our founder Javad Ashjaee, a GPS/GNSS pioneer and visionary, on the morning of May 30, 2020, due to COVID-19 in Moscow, Russia,” reports a statement on the JAVAD GNSS website.

The website continues, “Over the course of 37 years, Javad made an incredible and far-reaching impact in the GNSS community. He pioneered the world’s most advanced GNSS technology through a multi-national effort that combined GPS and GLONASS and established more than a quarter century of partnership between Silicon Valley and Moscow. He was always proud of this ‘success story of cooperation.’ Javad was a true industry disrupter long before the term and concept became popular. His whole way of doing business was challenging and disrupting to the status quo.”

Read more about Ashjaee in his own words on the JAVAD GNSS website, where he describes the founding of his company:

“In 1998 I founded JAVAD Positioning Systems (JPS) and introduced Legacy, Odyssey and Regency products, followed by HiPer. It was a 76-channel geodetic receiver. Other companies later copied HiPer. Today, many of GNSS receivers look like it. I sold JPS to Topcon, who changed its name to Topcon Positioning System and is a very successful company.

“In 2007, after my obligations to Topcon ended and according to the provisions of our agreement, I founded JAVAD GNSS and introduced Triumph products. These were 216-channel receivers, integrated with several communication channels. We also introduced their Alpha, Delta, and Sigma versions. We were again the first to offer European Galileo and Japanese QZSS tracking in mass production. Triumph technology has been shown to have the best signal quality and best multipath reduction capabilities against all others tested by the German Aerospace. We also introduced GLONASS inter-channel (group/carrier delay) calibration to 0.2 millimeter which made GLONASS FDMA as good as GPS CDMA. JAVAD GNSS is growing fast and gaining market share.”

More on Javad throughout the years

Ashjaee’s nephew Sol Adibnejad provided this biography on his uncle via social media:

Javad was born in 1949 in Qom, Iran. After finishing his bachelor’s degree in electronic physics from the University of Teheran in Iran, he left Iran in 1972 to continue his education at the University of Iowa and got his graduate degrees, a doctorate in 1976. He went back to his native country Iran to teach at the university. He became the chairman of the Department of Computer Engineering at the Aryamehr University of Technology where he founded and managed a UNIVAC-100 computer centre. There, he created the first Iranian microprocessor lab. In 1978 he created one of the earliest student online and interactive registration systems in the world. In a few years and after the 1978 revolution and the political turmoil, things happened and he had to flee the country in 1981.

He went straight back to the U.S. and started the next chapter of his journey in life which led to the pioneering of GPS. He spent the rest of his life designing and manufacturing of many generations of his GPS and JPS products at JAVAD GNSS, JAVAD ArWest and JAVAD EMS in the Silicon Valley. Javad Ashjaee is listed as the primary inventor in 102 granted patents, the last one in April 2020.

Below is his post on Facebook.