Sunday, April 27, 2008

Atheros Expands its GPS Silicon Portfolio

Atheros Communications has expanded its Radio-on-Chip for Mobile (ROCm) family of GPS solutions with a hardware and software combination that targets GPS in mobile phones, Personal Navigation Devices (PNDs) and Personal Media Players (PMPs).


Atheros' new solution consists of its second-generation, single-chip GPS receiver, the AR1511, and companion ORION 3.0 software suite.
New features specifically designed to address the most challenging navigation environments provide considerable performance advances, with Time To First Fix (TTFF) reacquisition times reduced by nearly half, and positional accuracy increased by more than 50 percent.http://www.atheros.com

  • In December 2007, 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.