Atheros Acquires u-Nav Microelectronics for GPS Silicon

Atheros Communications agreed to acquire the assets and certain liabilities of u-Nav Microelectronics, a privately held fabless semiconductor company specializing in global positioning system (GPS) chipsets and software that enable mobile location-based products and services. Financial terms were not disclosed.



u-Nav's silicon is designed for embedded GPS applications for the wireless handset, personal navigation device, personal computing, consumer and mobile telemetry markets. Its flagship product, the uN3010, is a single-chip GPS receiver that integrates the company's CMOS high-performance RFIC core with its third-generation baseband IC core. u-Nav's product portfolio also includes single-die solutions, several baseband chips and RFICs, and complete GPS system software solutions providing signal acquisition, tracking, data extraction and GPS navigation.



Upon closing the transaction, Atheros will also take assignment of the patent cross-license agreement already in place between u-Nav and SiRF Technology.



Atheros said the addition of u-Nav's shipping GPS products and technologies to Atheros' Radio-on-Chip for Mobile (ROCm) portfolio enables the company to deliver high-performance, cost-efficient combinations of mobile solutions featuring WLAN, Bluetooth and GPS technologies.



Atheros said its goal is to provide optimized wireless coexistence, supporting multiple radios in a single device for local area networking, personal area networking and mobile location-based services.



u-Nav Microelectronics is based in Irvine, California, with offices in Tampere, Finland. u-Nav has 54 employees.

http://www.atheros.com/http://www.unav-micro.com/