SiRF and NXP Semiconductors Collaborate on GPS-Enabled 3G Handsets

There is a rash of GPS/Mobile Phone announcements coming out right now because there is a 3GSM Mobile Phone conference running in Spain next week, as everyone is rolling out their innovations ahead of time, especially in the chip area. I have talked with several insiders recently who believe that the mobile phone GPS combination will see a surge in 2007, so we might as well start with a few chip announcements...

Press Release follows...
SiRF announced a collaboration with NXP Semiconductors, the newly independent semiconductor company founded by Philips, to speed the development of cost-effective, location-aware 3G wireless handsets. The collaboration will provide global handset manufacturers with leading Assisted-GPS-compliant, integrated reference designs based upon NXP's Nexperia cellular system solution for 3G with SiRFstarIII A-GPS and SiRFLoc(R) technologies.

Expected to be available in the second quarter of this year, the reference design will feature Nexperia cellular system solution 7210 with SiRF's single-chip SiRFstarIII GSC3LT A-GPS receiver. The GSC3LT delivers flagship SiRFstarIII multimode A-GPS performance with sophisticated power management and control functions to help lower power consumption as well as reduce complexity and bill of material costs. The reference design will also incorporate SiRF's patented SiRFLoc software, the world's first multimode A-GPS solution, which optimizes mobile phones to support a wide range of location-based services based on both control plane and user plane architectures. The standards-based SiRFLoc client software is fully supported by the SiRFLoc Server, a carrier-class, standards-compliant, multimode Aided- GPS location server that enables wireless carriers to support a wide range of location-based services with greater efficiency and better-controlled network loading.

"Combining the NXP Nexperia cellular system solution 7210 with SiRFstarIII architecture technology provides a leading A-GPS reference design that will help drive down the cost and speed the development of next-generation, location-aware wireless handsets," said Kanwar Chadha, founder and vice president of marketing for SiRF. "Our collaboration with NXP is yet another example of SiRF's commitment to providing industry leading, fully integrated A-GPS solutions tailored to meet the growing need for location in the wireless marketplace."

"Our Nexperia cellular system solutions are some of the most extensively proven designs available, and account for more than one in every ten GSM/GPRS handsets in use today," said Marc Humbert, Product Manager at NXP. "SiRF's industry expertise and experience in enabling wireless A-GPS handsets ensure that together we can provide handset manufacturers with new 3G reference designs that deliver significant improvements on traditional and existing GPS services."

The reference designs will be pre-tested for full type approval (FTA) and undergo complete interoperability testing (IOT), and will enable handset OEMs to get a jumpstart on their 3G feature phone designs and rapidly deliver quality phones with proven functionality. Because today's wireless device development cycles can range up to 18 months and consume thousands of engineering hours in development and testing, the reference designs can not only dramatically reduce their time-to-market, but also
free up engineers to focus on the man-machine interface (MMI), complex multimedia features, and more aesthetic problems, such as ergonomics and package design.

A winner of PC Magazine's Award for Technical Excellence, the SiRFstarIII architecture of the GSC3LT 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.

February 9, 2007

SiRF and NXP Semiconductors Collaborate on GPS-Enabled 3G Handsets