BARCELONA, Spain, Feb. 12, 2007 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) -- 3GSM World Congress -- NXP Semiconductors, the newly independent semiconductor company founded by Philips, and privately held Global Locate Inc. (www.globallocate.com), a leader in Assisted-GPS products and services, have announced availability of an A-GPS reference design based on the NXP Nexperia cellular system solution 7210 for EDGE/UMTS and Global Locate Hammerhead2(r) assisted GPS chip.
Recently released, Hammerhead II is the world's smallest A-GPS receiver, combining LNA, RF Tuner, PLL and baseband functions into a 3.74 mm x 3.59 mm x 0.6 mm single die CMOS chip. Global Locate's patented host-based architecture and unique signal processing techniques result in sensitivity to -160dBm, and position fix times as fast as one second, exceeding industry standards.
The reference design software supports RRLP (Radio Resource Location Protocol), RRC (Radio Resource Control), and SUPL (Secure User Plane Location) standards for Assisted-GPS (A-GPS), allowing handset manufacturers to comply with mobile operator and government location requirements in North America, Europe and Asia without additional software development.
"Global Locate is excited to work with an established world-wide semiconductor leader like NXP. We believe this reference design will offer best-in-class performance at a compelling price point for NXP's customers," remarked Donald Fuchs, executive vice president of business development for Global Locate. "Due to the strong customer base of NXP, it is important for the solution to provide comprehensive coverage of all modes of GPS operation, including E911, LBS (location based services) and navigation applications."
Marc Humbert, product marketing, NXP Semiconductors noted, "Incorporating Global Locate's A-GPS protocol stack and chips into our 2G/3G platforms and performing interoperability tests with major infrastructure vendors over the next few months will allow handset manufacturers to significantly reduce their engineering efforts and shorten the time to market, while enabling emergency call and location-based services."
A-GPS overcomes the limitations of traditional GPS services. Standard GPS receivers must download data from GPS satellites. This often takes several minutes for a conventional GPS receiver to download the required data from the satellites before computing its own location. With A-GPS, the same data can be relayed via an A-GPS server within a matter of seconds. This dramatically improves the performance of the GPS receiver in the mobile phone.
Evaluation and development kits based on the reference design are expected to be available in the second quarter of 2007.
About Global Locate, Inc.
Global Locate, Inc. is a privately held company that provides GPS semiconductor products and software for Mobile-phones, Personal Navigation Devices and Networks. The company has more than 160 U.S. & Foreign patents issued or pending, relating to GPS and Assisted-GPS (A-GPS) technology and its product suite includes Hammerhead(tm), the world's first commercial single die GPS receiver. The company is headquartered in San Jose, with offices in the New York metropolitan area, Tokyo, Taipei and Madrid. For more information see www.globallocate.com.
About NXP
NXP is a top 10 semiconductor company founded by Philips more than 50 years ago. Headquartered in Europe, the company has 37,000 employees working in 26 countries across the world. NXP creates semiconductors, system solutions and software that deliver better sensory experiences in mobile phones, personal media players, TVs, set-top boxes, identification applications, cars and a wide range of other electronic devices. News from NXP is located at www.nxp.com.
Global Locate, IndoorGPS, WWRN and LTO are trademarks of Global Locate, Inc.