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Technology Stocks : Ericsson overlook? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Eric L who wrote (4965)	3/12/2002 12:17:46 PM
From: Jim Oravetz	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5390

Cellular handsets call for new GPS chip sets By Rick Merritt<, EE Times Mar 11, 2002 (9:02 AM) URL: eetimes.com SAN JOSE, Calif. — Sirf Technology Inc. is rolling out three derivatives of its global-positioning satellite chip set, claiming the market will grow dramatically starting later this year as some mainstream cell phone makers begin designing handsets with integrated GPS. Sirf has respun its SirfStarIIe chip set in an 0.18-micron process to create the SirfStar-IIe/LP. It is also offering a simplified version of the chip set that off-loads navigation processing to a host CPU and another version that makes its GPS signal-acquisition technology available as a block that can be integrated with a host processor. "There is a big shift coming in how GPS is used. Up to now it has been mainly adopted by the automotive industry, but in the second half of this year wireless will start to become the largest segment of this industry," said Kanwar Chadha, founder and vice president of marketing for Sirf Technology. The Federal Communications Commission has mandated that 95 percent of all cellular subscribers in the United States have position location capabilities by 2005 and that by the end of 2003, 95 percent of new handsets have the capability, Chadha reported. Carriers Nextel, Sprint and Verizon — which collectively have a total of about 50 million subscribers — have filed plans with the Federal Communications Commission stating they will use embedded GPS in handsets to meet that requirement. AT&T, Cingular and Voicestream will use a form of triangulation. The FCC mandate is helping drive cellular design wins for Sirf. At the CTIA conference next week in Orlando, Fla., Motorola Inc. will announce that its iDen phone will use Sirf's GPS chip set and that Sirf will be its primary GPS partner with design wins across multiple products. Also at the show, Matsushita will announce a partnership to use Sirf's chip sets on CompactFlash and Secure Digital cards for mobile computing devices. And Sony Ericsson says it will design Sirf into telematics modules. The mobile emergency-call directive, or E911, "is the driver for putting GPS in handsets, but once this infrastructure is built out you will start to see location services get deployed," Chadha said. "I think that will happen starting next year." Sirf's II/LP chip set is a migration of its IIe design from a 0.35-micron embedded DRAM to an 0.18-micron SRAM process, reducing power consumption to about 150 milliwatts from about 500 mW. The internal core now runs at 1.8 volts, though I/O still runs at 3.3 V. The LP chip set consists of an RF device, built by STMicroelectronics and NEC, with integrated IF filter and made in a bipolar process. It has a separate baseband part built by Samsung which uses a 50-MHz ARM core and 1 Mbit of SRAM. A version of the chip set dubbed SirfStarII/t comes with software to do navigation processing on a host ARM, MIPS or SH CPU. This baseband, co-developed and built by STMicroelectronics, only acquires the GPS signal. It consists of an A/D converter, RAM and ROM and has just 48 pins, down from 144 pins on the LP. Chadha said this version will most likely be used in automotive applications, where systems often are equipped with relatively powerful PowerPC or SH host processors. Finally, the GPS signal acquisition baseband is available as a gate-level netlist to integrate into a host processor. This SirfStarII/IP version will mainly be used by cell phone makers trying to save cost and size. Sirf claims its intellectual property has already been licensed by five companies, which it declined to name. Sirf also recently closed a $20 million round of venture financing that drew investments from Intel and Dell. "The more we ramp up, the more money we need. We have multiple new classes of products to bring up," said Chadha. For some technical articles, check this out. commsdesign.com