SiRF Debuts SiRFlinkIII Combo Radio IC

08 October 2008, 11:06pm

SAN JOSE, Calif., October 8, 2008 - Continuing its leadership in driving higher levels of integration for GPS-enabled mobile devices, SiRF Technology Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: SIRF), a leading provider of GPS-powered location platforms, today unveiled the SiRFlinkIII� combination radio IC. The SiRFlinkIII single-chip solution combines a high-performance GPS RF front end and a complete Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR controller optimized for use with the SiRFatlas� and SiRFprima� multifunction SoC platforms. Available now with a well developed reference design and software drivers, the SiRFlinkIII solution is designed to drive its on-chip Bluetooth radio at full class 2.0 power while providing high GPS sensitivity, and offers low-cost, fast-time-to-market Bluetooth functionality to next-generation mobile convergence devices.

The SiRFlinkIII combo radio IC successfully passed Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR qualification tests as well as interoperability testing with more than 150 popular mobile phones in the market. Because the GPS and Bluetooth functions share many peripheral components, such as power regulators and clock sources, the SiRFlinkIII combo radio IC is able to offer a low bill of materials (BOM) cost and a small footprint solution for full-featured portable navigation devices (PNDs) and other mobile, location-aware devices. The SiRFlinkIII solution is pre-integrated with the SiRFatlas and SiRFprima SoC platforms, enabling it to include valuable features for Bluetooth operation in PNDs, such as noise and echo cancellation for superior voice performance, and is available with popular Bluetooth profiles such as HFP, A2DP, DUN and others from leading Bluetooth profile vendors. Bluetooth functionality operates over a standard HCI (UART) interface with existing Bluetooth profiles and applications.

"SiRFlinkIII is designed to address our customers' need to build cost-effective mobile navigation and location-aware devices with wireless connectivity for enhanced functionality, such as hands-free calling, without compromising the location performance," said Kanwar Chadha, vice president of marketing and founder of SiRF. "By pre-integrating SiRFlinkIII with our multifunction SoC platforms, we are able to optimize the system-level performance while minimizing the design complexity for our customers to enable them to accelerate their time to market."
According to Chadha, SiRF, as a leader in the location technology field, continually strives to anticipate customer needs for enhanced functionality, and utilizes its multidimensional technical expertise to create more value-added products to address these needs in a cost-effective way. SiRFlinkIII is the latest example of such innovation.

The SiRFlinkIII IC's high level of integration minimizes external components and offers greater engineering design flexibility when dealing with today's space-limited handheld devices, while the pre-integrated evaluation kit, audio software, profiles and other features should enable manufacturers to significantly speed their time to market.

"We were very excited to see the live demo of the SiRFlinkIII combo radio IC. As Bluetooth in PNDs becomes a popular way to provide hands-free operation and other features for drivers, the SiRFlinkIII solution makes it possible for us to add Bluetooth functionality into our current PND products with acceptable BOM cost and within existing space constraints," said Larry Yu, CEO of Yuanfeng Electronics, the largest PND maker in China. "The pre-integrated Bluetooth profiles, echo cancellation, noise cancellation and other features will save a lot of effort for OEMs."

"The SiRFlinkIII IC has shown great compatibility during the IOP testing in our lab with the Bluetooth profiles we ported, and BlueSoleil�, our complete Bluetooth software solution, has been fully ported to the SiRFlinkIII IC and the SiRFprima SoC platform," said Dr. Gao Qiang, CEO of IVT Corporation. "We believe the SiRFlinkIII solution and SiRF's position as the leading platform provider for the PND market will have a great influence on making Bluetooth a standard PND feature in the future."

Availability and Pricing

The SiRFlinkIII combo radio IC is sampling to lead customers now, with full production volumes anticipated by the end of this year. As with most SiRF solutions, a complete reference design and full evaluation kit is also available now. Please contact SiRF for pricing and more information.

SiRF Technology Holdings, Inc.

Geo: International