The ability to press a button to locate your child, find your car in a crowded parking lot or retrieve your lost dog may soon be a reality, said Sunnyvale, Calif.-based SiRF Technology Inc.
The one-year-old company has developed a Global Positioning System chipset that is expected to drive widespread adoption of products and applications that provide instant location information.
Historically, entry into the GPS industry has been difficult because the cost of deploying the technology has been high. Most of the equipment-chips, boards, systems and software-supports only low-volume, high-priced system markets, such as car navigation systems, said the company.
SiRF said it has designed a chipset and modular software package called SiRFstar that allows original equipment manufacturers to easily and cost effectively embed GPS technology into portable computers, cellular phones, entertainment systems, handheld devices and a range of new consumer products.
“GPS has been very complex and expensive,” said Kanwar Chadha, co-founder and vice president of marketing and sales at SiRF. “We’ve tried to eliminate the expensive architecture.”
SiRFstar uses crystals and filters instead of expensive components used by current GPS receivers, and integration at the chipset level allows system designers to reduce components and improve performance, said the company.
SiRF said it has addressed technical problems faced by current GPS systems. Since GPS signals cannot transmit through large structures-such as buildings, tunnels and over-pass bridges-current receivers, once they pass through these areas, typically take several seconds to re-establish the satellite signal, said the company. Products that use the SiRFstar chipset will be able to pick up the signal in about one-10th of a second, said SiRF.
With SingleSat navigation, a SiRF-enabled GPS receiver can continue to obtain positioning information from a single satellite, while other GPS products require at least two or more satellite signals in order to calculate a position, said the company.
Another problem current GPS receivers face is multipath errors, which result from signals reflecting off buildings. SiRF said its dual multipath signal rejection scheme will significantly reduce these errors.
In areas with foliage, the chipset-based receiver has the ability to track extremely weak signals, providing better navigation in rural areas, said SiRF.
The government’s commitment to removing selective availability also is paving the way for the introduction of GPS-based consumer products, said the company.
“The U.S. government has a scrambler that degrades the signal within 100 meters for spies,” said Chadha. The government has committed to switching it off in the next few years.
SiRF said it will begin production of the chipset in October, and has been working with several equipment manufacturers on product concepts. SiRFstar-based products are expected to reach the consumer market by the end of the year, said the company.
