Electronic – STM32 GPIO Speed

Note:
This answer was originally written before we knew anything about the receiver, like its 1.8V power supply. Telaclavo's answer is good. As a more general answer the PNP/MOSFET solution remains; you don't want to power parts of your circuit from a microcontroller's I/O pin.

You don't want to do that! You'd configure the pin as output and make it high to provide power to the GPS receiver, but microcontrollers I/Os can only supply limited current, 25mA for the STM32F205xx (Section 6.2 page 72 of the datasheet), which will be too low for powering your (and any other) GPS receiver (34 to 38 mA, as stated in the datasheet)

Use the I/O pin to drive a PNP transistor which will supply the required current.

Note that using a PNP inverses your logic: a logic low will turn the receiver on.

I would not use an NPN for this. In common emitter it would mean that the receiver's ground is a few hundred mV above ground, and a circuit should have one single ground which is the same for every component. In common collector you would lose too much of your 3.3V power supply.

edit
Wouter would use a MOSFET instead of a BJT, and that's a good alternative. Just make sure you choose a logic-level FET, which will give you enough current at a \$V_{GS}\$ of -3.3V. The Rohm RZE002P02 is a suitable type. It will also have a lower voltage drop if your receiver needs less than about 200mA.

edit 2 (re clabacchio's addition of a datasheet)
This device operates at 1.8V, the STM32 at 3.3V. You can use an LDO with an enable input and control that from your microcontroller. No transistor needed. (Thanks for the suggestion, markrages.) You'll also need level shifters for the data.

I answered to your related question why you could only toggle at 4 MHz when you expected 100 MHz:

If the 4 MHz is about 4 MHz, and not exactly 100 MHz/25 then the problem is probably with the C function GPIO_WriteBit.

For high speed operations and operations which require accurate timing you better code in assembly than in C. If you look at the assembly code created by GPIO_WriteBit it may be half a page long, depending on what kind of features the function has, and how much the compiler's optimizer can do with it.

You don't say which development toolchain you're using, but many/most C compilers can handle in-line assembly.

So, write the functions in assembly. A function like

 GPIO_InitStructure.GPIO_Mode = GPIO_Mode_OUT;

should take no more than 2 instructions in assembly, while the compiled C code may take 20 times as much. Or more.