Latest news extracts about GPS and wireless technologies

Why GPS and GSM news brought together?

What do they have in common? The only common factor is that both use HF radio signals for their operation. But there is more. Already today GPS is getting incorporated in GSMs(Europe), cell phones(USA) and mobile phones(UK) and this development is accelerating in a great pace. In only a couple of years (almost) all GSMs will have a GPS receiver incorporated. And not the poor performing GPS receivers as we know them now from our handheld devices. No, the GSM/GPS combinations must be able to locate themselves under the most difficult circumstances i.e. indoors, in parking garages, in urban canyons, in large buildings etc.

The market for these GPS receivers is so huge, compared to the market for handheld GPS receivers (a factor 200 or so), that every manufacturer will put all on all to make this a success.

We already knew the Global Locate A-GPS chip-set with over 20,000 hardware correlators integrated. This means that the hardware does a lot of the computational work. Acquires satellites with signals below -158dBm at a 100 times lower power consumption. Time-to-first-fix as low as 250 msec. In the mean time Global Locate has been taken over by Broadcom.

And SiRF sells its third generation SiRFStarIII chipset with the equivalent of more than 200,000 correlators. Weak GPS signals (up to -159dBm) can be processed and with that indoor GPS exists already. The SiRFSoft GPS architecture is portable to the market leading platforms such as Intel XScale and OMAPI. This means that the system can be incorporated in GSMs, cell phones, Smartphones, PDAs and other wireless handheld devices.

End September 2006 u-blox AG announced the u-blox 5 family of GPS and Galileo-ready single chips and chipsets featuring an acquisition performance of under 1 second. The new chips also feature SuperSense -160 dBm acquisition and tracking sensitivity, power needs of less than 50 mW and a footprint smaller than 100 mm2, making u-blox 5 receivers ideal for PDAs, personal navigation devices, cameras, cell phones, media players and other battery-operated portable devices. u-blox 5‘s ultra-fast acquisition time is due to its 50-channel architecture with over 1 million correlators and separate acquisition and tracking engines, capable of massively parallel searches.

Hundreds of millions of people will permanently carry a high performance GPS receiver with them, wherever they go. GPS and GSM go together.