SiRF Integrates Baseband, RF, And Flash Into A Single Package
San Jose, CA -- SiRF Technology Holdings, a supplier of GPS-enabled location technology, today unveiled a new family of highly integrated, low-power GPS products -- the GSC3f and the GSC3 -- based on the company's SiRFstarIII architecture unveiled last year. The SiRF GSC3f combines a complete A-GPS digital baseband processor, RF front end, and 4 megabits of flash memory in a single 7 mm by 10 mm package, providing makers of cell phones, PDAs, digital cameras and other portable and wireless devices with a drop-in A-GPS solution they can use to deliver real-time location and navigation capabilities in a simpler, smaller design with extended battery life.
The first SiRFstarIII receivers in a single package, the GSC3f and the GSC3 (without internal flash memory) will deliver excellent sensitivity, low power consumption, and fast time to first fix (TTFF) in a compact, 140-pin BGA package. The digital section of both the GSC3f and GSC3 includes a SiRFstarIII core GPS signal processor that handles all the time critical and low latency acquisition, tracking and reacquisition tasks autonomously, and a 50-MHz ARM7TDMI processor designed to run many OEM user applications.
The GSC3f has integrated 4-megabit flash memory, eliminating the need for an external flash component and simplifying the routing associated with integrating a GPS receiver into a board design. Supporting multiple reference frequencies, the RF section of the GSC3f and GSC3 is the most highly integrated, lowest-power SiRF RF implementation to date, combining an RTC and monitor circuitry and is designed to bring many components that were previously on the board into the silicon while reducing RF current consumption to just 13 mA.
"We intend to lead the market in providing creative solutions to enable new applications for GPS technology," said Kanwar Chadha, founder and VP of marketing for SiRF. "This innovative A-GPS solution delivers the high performance, low power and small footprint that we anticipate will location-enable the smallest mobile phones, power-constrained smart devices and compact digital cameras."
According to Chadha, this innovation is designed to deliver unmatched TTFF at the low signal levels of the original two-chip SiRFstarIII set, while occupying 20% less board real estate than SiRF's original SiRFstarIII implementation, and consuming no more power than the earlier SiRFstarII product.
Able to track more than 20 satellites, the SiRFstarIII architecture achieves a TTFF of one second for aided starts in outdoor GSM environments and acquires signals down to -159 dBm, making real-time navigation practical in challenging environments such as urban canyons and dense foliage. Unlike the lengthy sequential search process of traditional GPS architectures, the SiRFstarIII architecture, with the equivalent of more than 200,000 correlators, enables fast and deep GPS signal search capabilities, resulting in significant improvement over today's architectures that contain a few hundred to a few thousand correlators.
The GSC3f and GSC3 are supported by SiRFLoc multimode technology, SiRF's patented location solution that allows networks to move beyond basic "find and locate" applications to support a wide range of location-based services (LBS) such as navigation and real-time routing with minimal network bandwidth requirements. The SiRFLoc client software that runs on the GSC3 family can determine position with aiding from GSM, WCDMA, CDMA, iDEN and PDC networks -- or completely autonomously -- using multiple dynamically configurable modes.
The SiRF GSC3f and GSC3 are available now in production quantities.
Source: SiRF Technology