Trimble GPS chip plans . . .
This is from the Electronic Engineering Times of December 22:
According to Marc Prioleau, Trimble's director of marketing, "We are trying to move beyond board-level, vehicle-based systems to truly portable applications, like having a GPS receiver hidden in your PDA or your cell phone. That will require most of that board of electronics to shrink to a single chip, or maybe just a portion of an ASIC."
The article also noted, "For the near term, the RF stage will continue to be a separate chip, in [Prioleau's] opinion. 'The front end of course requires 1.5-GHz capability, and it is very sensitive.' Trimble is working with a number of foundries to find a way to integrate the RF stage with the digital electronics, but Prioleau said it is 'too early to speculate on what approach will win.'"
According to this report, cell phone application is problematic, since the RF stage is power intensive and demanding on batteries.
There was also some technical explanation of GPS boards, which I assume all you engineers already pretty much know. To me, the news is the status of Trimble's efforts to reduce GPS to a one-chip medium. And I didn't see Intel mentioned in the article. |
