CSR announce the SiRFstarIV GPS Chipset

[luvlara]

Last time I met Kanwar Chadha was at the Mobile World Congress, Barcelona in February this year. At that time the Merger of CSR and SiRF had just been announced and nobody was allowed to talk about anything until the deal had been completed. Kanwar said there was some exciting things on the horizon, but he was not able to be specific. Well this week CSR announced the latest in the SiRFstar family of GPS chipsets: the SiRFstar1V.

At MWC Kanwar was telling me about the need for GPS chipsets to become ubiquitous in a wide range of electronic devices. One of the main barriers to this was the size and power consumption of the GPS chipsets. The SiRFstar1V has now hit that mark and provides a sensitive, fast fix, and low power GPS chipset in a small package.

The obvious implementation model for this latest SiRF device is mobile phones, with Smartphones becoming ever more powerful there is a fine balance between power consumption and functionality. But why stop at phones, this chipset is ideal for all kinds of applications such as digital cameras and tracking devices.

The CSR SiRFstarIV press release follows:

CSR debuts breakthrough SiRFstarIV location-aware architecture
SiRFaware technology delivers continuous location awareness without compromising battery life

CAMBRIDGE, UK and SAN JOSE, Calif., July 28, 2009 – CSR plc., a leading provider of GPS-powered location platforms, today launched its breakthrough SiRFstarIV(™) location-aware architecture with exclusive SiRFaware(™) self-assisted, micro-power GPS technology that enables consumer devices to always be location aware – without draining batteries and without requiring network aiding. CSR today also introduced its first SiRFstarIV-based product, the GSD4t receiver, which offers a superior solution for enabling mobile phones and other space- and power-constrained devices to have the robust, always-available geo-awareness consumers are demanding.

“I am very pleased that we are able to launch such a major, breakthrough technology so soon after our merger with SiRF,” said Joep van Beurden, CEO of CSR. “Today’s announcement significantly strengthens our GPS product offerings and our location technology portfolio.”

The essence of the SiRFstarIV breakthrough is its ability to continually maintain “better-than-hot-start” conditions in the GPS receiver for fast location fixes without having to be kept fully turned on all the time and draining precious battery power. Until now, designers of mobile devices were forced to completely turn off GPS receivers when not in use to conserve power, causing annoying start-up delays when a location application needed to get a new location fix quickly. Through a fusion of multiple innovations, the unique SiRFaware technology overcomes this barrier with or without network aiding while consuming only 50-500 microamperes of current.

“With consumers expecting reliable location services everywhere, we had to rewrite the traditional rule book on GPS architectures and create a new, low-energy way to maintain continuous location awareness without draining the device battery or requiring network assistance,” said Kanwar Chadha, Chief Marketing Officer for CSR and Founder of SiRF. “With SiRFstarIV and our unique SiRFaware technology, we have developed an architecture that will not only significantly improve the consumer experience when navigating with smartphones, but also enable consumer devices to maintain continuous location awareness.”

According to Chadha, people count on using their mobile phones and other mobile consumer devices just about everywhere, and expect pretty much the same of these devices’ location functionality, and this was a critical consideration while developing the SiRFstarIV architecture. As a result, SiRFstarIV GPS receivers are more compatible with how consumers actually use these kinds of products, delivering a superior user experience by enabling handsets and other mobile devices to always get a fast location fix without significantly impacting battery life. SiRFstarIV’s unique blend of high performance and low energy location-awareness modes opens the door to the more widespread use of GPS in digital still cameras and camcorders, hand-held games and a wide variety of portable consumer electronics devices.

The SiRFstarIV Architecture
The SiRFstarIV architecture core is comprised of a high-performance GPS location engine, smart location sensor interface, adaptive micro-power manager and active jammer remover, which together deliver:
• Twice the search capacity of the industry proven SiRFstarIII™ architecture, resulting in enhanced sensitivity, reduced time-to-fix and improved positional accuracy
• Advanced micro-power management and integrated switched-mode regulation that maintains hot-start conditions with minimal energy (50-500 microamperes)
• Intelligent MEMs sensor support (for accelerometers and other sensors) that improves the location experience, enabling greater contextual awareness, more sophisticated energy management and enhanced indoor positional accuracy
• Advanced DSP technology that actively searches for jammers and removes them prior to correlation for maximum GPS performance and design troubleshooting

SiRFstarIV GSD4t
The first implementation of the SiRFstarIV architecture, the GSD4t host-based platform, is optimised for mobile phones and other space and power-sensitive consumer devices. The GSD4t receiver provides industry leading performance, with navigation to -160 dBm, tracking to -163 dBm and excellent pass margins for E911 and 3GPP. It can maintain its full rated -160-dBm acquisition sensitivity without network assistance. A low-power champion, the GSD4t receiver requires only 8 mW in 1-Hz TricklePower mode – two and a half times less than the industry benchmark SiRFstarIII.

SiRFstarIV GSD4t features such as active jamming removal, single-SAW design, an on-chip LNA, fail-safe I/O, integrated switchers, single supply voltage, simple RF matching and small size and packaging also make SiRF’s GPS receivers easier for designers to use and integrate into their products.

“Radio frequency interference within a portable consumer product, such as from embedded Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and mobile radios, as well as LCD screens, can easily inhibit GPS performance, and often does not become apparent until shortly before the product is due to go into production. This can easily add months of delay until the issue is resolved,” said Dave Huntingford, Director of Product Management for CSR’s Handset Business Unit. “Our unique active jammer removal not only solves this issue, but can pinpoint for designers much earlier in the development process the precise strength and source of these interfering signals, enabling them to be contained in the design phase rather than in later, more costly test phases.”

Available in a 42-ball, 0.4-mm pitch wafer level chip scale package (WLCSP), the GSD4t offers low integration and BOM costs and fast time-to-market, combining RF receiver, baseband, switcher and low-current LDOs on a single chip, and requiring only six to eight external passive components and a single SAW to provide a complete solution that occupies less than 20 square millimeters, including switcher parts.

Availability and Pricing

The SiRF GSD4t host-based GPS receiver is available now in sample quantities, with production quantities planned for October. Please contact your CSR sales representatives for pricing information.

[Fellwalker]

Interesting. Does this mean the end to forgetting where you took that photograph?

This may be what finally makes a camera with integrated location data possible. No need to remember where that photo was taken. Up to now location data has been a luxury item with all sorts of issues about switching the camera on long enough before taking the photo, or having a constantly running GPS tagger alongside, and hoping that you or the software could make sense of the differing time codes.

Maybe mobile phone pictures will get EXIF, or XMS tags? (Maybe posh ones do but my Motorola and my wife's Nokia do not).

Samples now, production October, available in devices when? Hopefully this was a very well kept secret and manufacturers have already built it into designs.
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Samsung Galaxy Note 9, Nexus 5, Galaxy tab S3. Also use OSMAnd+, Sygic Mobile Maps, and OS maps app. Also "Great Britain Topo Maps" and "Old Maps". Don't use speed camera database as sticking to the limit is safer.

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