SiRF Technology, a leading supplier of GPS-enabled location technology, today unveiled a new family of highly integrated, low-power GPS products - the GSC3f and the GSC3 - based on the company's SiRFstarIII architecture unveiled last year. The SiRF GSC3f for the first time combines a complete A-GPS digital baseband processor, RF front end and 4 megabits of flash memory in a single 7 mm x 10 mm package, providing makers of cell phones, PDAs, digital cameras and other portable and wireless devices with a drop-in A-GPS solution they can use to deliver real-time location and navigation capabilities in a simpler, smaller design with extended battery life.
Able to track more than 20 satellites, the SiRFstarIII architecture achieves a remarkable TTFF of one second for aided starts in outdoor GSM environments and acquires signals down to -159 dBm, making real-time navigation practical in challenging environments such as urban canyons and dense foliage. Unlike the lengthy sequential search process of traditional GPS architectures, the SiRFstarIII architecture, with the equivalent of more than 200,000 correlators, enables fast and deep GPS signal search capabilities, resulting in significant improvement over today's architectures that contain a few hundred to a few thousand correlators.
Insight: We also spent time looking at the entire opportunity in the cell phone arena. So far, only Nextel has incorporated GPS into their phones and while the carriers have a Federal mandate called e911 that must be met within the next year, most vendors have decided to not to incorporate GPS in the handset because of added cost but, rather, adopt a network centric solution for positioning which isn’t as accurate but meets the mandate requirements. Thus in order to get a good GPS solution, you need to buy a GPS module that uses Bluetooth to communicate to the cell phone (or notebook PC). Sprint has announced its intention to acquire Nextel and, therefore, the location determination solution is up for grabs. I expect that GPS chipsets will dominate in the SmartPhone arena as the cost structure will allow for high end units to incorporate GPS. And, as location determination becomes pervasive in wireless handsets, then location based services (LBS) will begin to explode into the market.
