Product category:
Communications ICs (Wireless)
News Release from: SiRF Technology | Subject: SiRFstarIIA
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 17 May 2005
SoC hosts automotive navigation and
telematics
The SiRFstarIIA GPS system on chip is billed as a highly integrated and cost-effective solution for creating affordable automotive navigation and telematics systems.
Building on its momentum in the position-enabled silicon business, SiRF Technology Holdings has released the SiRFstarIIA GPS system on chip, a highly integrated and cost-effective solution for creating affordable automotive navigation and telematics systems The groundbreaking SiRFstarIIA combines the industry-leading SiRFstarII GPS engine, a powerful, 32bit ARM CPU and virtually all the peripheral interface circuitry required by in-vehicle navigation and telematics systems, and is supported by a robust array of SiRF and partner-provided development tools and applications to help customers reduce product development effort and cost, minimise recurring costs and accelerate time to market
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 23 May 2005 at 8.00am (UK)
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The SiRFstarIIA takes the industry's leading GPS engine and incorporates it into a multifunction system-on-chip (SoC).
It starts with SiRF's pioneering SiRFstarIIe architecture, embeds a 32bit ARM720T CPU into the GPS baseband platform for running applications, and adds an extensive suite of peripheral interfaces - including UARTs, CAN bus, USB, SPI, ATAPI/EIDE, 16bit Hi-Fi audio digital to analogue convertors, 14bit precision digital to analogue convertors, and 34 general-purpose I/O pins - supporting the man-machine interface and audio functions, as well as all other connection and control of system functions, dramatically reducing total bill of materials costs.
Along with SiRF's suite of support tools for system development, including GPS and dead reckoning applications, SiRF is partnering with QNX Software Systems to provide a complete state-of-the-art system development kit (SDK) and board support package (BSP) based on the QNX Neutrino real-time operating system, and with Horizon Navigation to offer its NavMate software for sample turn-by-turn and map-based navigation applications.
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"The SiRFstarIIA is a significant milestone for SiRF, representing our first system-on-chip solution created for a specific market segment to enable a new class of cost-effective auto navigation and telematics systems", said Kanwar Chadha, founder and Vice President of SiRF Technology.
"It has already been adopted by a leading European Tier 1 navigation supplier and again demonstrates SiRF's commitment to making GPS enabled systems affordable to the mainstream".
"Combined with our SiRFDRive2 software and a comprehensive support environment from SiRF and our world-class development partners, it provides all the elements needed by our customers for launching successful products".
The power and flexibility of the SiRFstarIIA makes it an ideal central component for a variety of automotive telematics products, including emergency and concierge services, road-tolling, security and low-cost navigation and "infotainment" systems.
The SiRFstarIIA may also be used as the core processor for marine and handheld consumer navigation systems.
The SiRFstarIIA works with SiRFDRive1 and the recently announced SiRFDRive2 GPS/dead reckoning software, an innovative approach to maximising position availability and accuracy for automotive navigation and telematics applications that significantly reduces overall system costs by tapping the vehicle databus as a source of distributed sensor information and eliminating the need for a costly automotive gyro.
"QNX is excited by the opportunity to expand its partnership with SiRF to harness the unique capabilities of our products and address stringent automotive requirements in a most cost-effective manner", said Dan Dodge, President and CEO of QNX Software Systems.
"Our QNX Momentics development suite and ARM board support package provide time-saving tools for the entire development cycle to build and optimise applications for the QNX Neutrino RTOS, all in a single, easy-to-use environment".
"Horizon Navigation, a pioneer and world leader in automotive navigation hardware and software, is proud to partner our robust and proven NavMate technology with the SiRFstarIIA development environment".
"We are confident our NavMate technology will allow SiRF's customers to quickly develop cost-effective products with world-class navigation capabilities", said Laura White, President and CEO of Horizon Navigation.
"Over the past 15 years, Horizon's engineers have developed navigation systems for all three American automobile manufacturers, as well as European manufacturers, and created the first dynamic route guidance system combining GPS technology with real-time traffic data".
The SiRFstarIIA builds on the performance of the SiRFstarII architecture.
With an average cold start time of just 45s, signal acquisition is accomplishing using 1920 time/frequency search channels.
SiRF multipath mitigation, FoliageLock and SingleSat deliver optimum tracking performance.
The ARM720T 32bit RISC processor with MMU and four-channel DMA offers over 65MIPS, features sophisticated power management control and can address up to 128Mbyte of external SDRAM and 8Mbyte SRAM/Flash.
The SiRF SiRFstarIIA is available now in production quantities.
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