SiRF Brings SiRFstarIII(TM) Pizzazz to Price-Conscious GPS Platforms
biz.yahoo.com
Friday February 9, 8:30 am ET
Multimode Satellite Signal Processor Innovation Delivers Industry Leading GPS Performance in Extremely Compact and Low Cost Solution
SAN JOSE, Calif. Feb. 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- SiRF Technology Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: SIRF), a leading provider of GPS-enabled silicon and premium software location platforms, today introduced the SiRFstarIII GSD3t, a Multimode Aided-GPS Satellite Signal Processor, in an extremely small-footprint, that brings industry leading SiRFstarIII GPS performance to price-conscious and space-constrained mobile devices such as cell phones. Available in an extremely thin package, less than 10 square millimeter in size, the GSD3t combines radio frequency, as well as analog and signal processing functionalities in a single 90 nm RFCMOS die. The GSD3t takes full advantage of SiRF's Adaptive Power Management and Trickle Power(TM) technology to deliver high performance while consuming very low power.
Minimizing the loading but taking advantage of the host platform resources, the GSD3t allows manufacturers to add GPS functionality to their products at minimal cost in terms of components and circuit board area, achieving SiRFstarIII performance in the most economical way. The GSD3t combines all baseband and radio-frequency functions of the SiRFstarIII architecture on a single die to create a host coupled GPS solution with market leading price/performance. Available in both WLCSP and FBGA packages, the GSD3t is able to deliver -160 dBm signal acquisition in AGPS mode and better than -160 dBm signal tracking capability to provide location data under the harshest outdoor conditions, and even in many indoor locations. The accompanying SiRFNav® software, utilizing SiRF's market tested and proprietary navigation algorithms, runs on the host processor in parallel with other host applications. The SiRFNav software supports autonomous GPS navigation, Multimode Aided-GPS navigation (both user plane and control plane) and SiRF's exclusive SiRFInstantFix(TM), a service that minimizes the start-up wait time for GPS systems.
"SiRF once again leads the industry in using architectural innovations and advanced technology to address the needs of our customers for adding GPS to high volume, cost and space sensitive platforms, without making any performance compromises," said Kanwar Chadha, founder and vice president of marketing for SiRF. "By providing proven SiRFstarIII performance that consumers recognize and demand at attractive price points, SiRF is enabling its customers to drive GPS further into the mainstream."
According to Chadha, SiRF will be partnering with a number of wireless and other consumer platform providers to provide fully validated and tightly integrated solutions that make it very easy for customers to successfully adopt the GSD3t for their platforms.
The GSD3t handles all of the time critical aspects of obtaining measurements from the GPS satellites, and passes the pre-processed non real-time critical data to the SiRFNav software running on the host for further processing. The SiRFNav host software integrates easily with host processors and operating systems using minimal resource overhead. The GSD3t with SiRFNav standard software provides SiRF autonomous mode GPS navigation, and sets new performance benchmarks. Optional SiRFInstantFix technology eliminates the need to decode GPS satellite data from the satellites themselves, to deliver a faster time-to-first-fix (TTFF), even in weak signal environments.
The GSD3t also supports SiRF's patented SiRFLoc technology, the world's first multimode Aided-GPS solution, for powering mobile phones optimized for location-based services. SiRFLoc® technology improves GPS location capability in wireless system environments by utilizing various modes of wireless infrastructure assistance to improve weak signal reception. In Aided-GPS applications, the GSD3t can achieve TTFF in about 60 seconds at -160 dBm signal levels, typical of indoor reception environments.
The GSD3t's GPS performance is fully compliant with the industry-standard Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) TS25.171 and CDMA TIA916 requirements, with extremely fast assisted fix speeds that are often significantly faster than required by the standard.
A winner of PC Magazine's Award for Technical Excellence, the SiRFstarIII architecture used in the GSD3t can track more than 20 GPS satellites, employs the equivalent of more than 200,000 correlators and sophisticated navigation algorithms and makes real-time navigation practical in almost any environment. |
