SiRF moves into phone arena

09 February 2008, 10:51am

SiRF Technology Inc. has entered the competitive multimedia phone market with its multifunction platform, SiRFprima.

Building on its current location engine, SiRF has integrated an ARM11 core into the platform, a 3D graphics core from Imagination Technologies which has other multimedia processing capabilities. SiRF ha now entered a market traditionally dominated by Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Broadcom.

SiRF plans to leverage its position as a development partner for Google's GPhone, via the Android initiative. SiRF describes its specialty as folding "location-awareness" features into mobile devices - and these no longer equate to only GPS-enabled devices.

SiRF (San Jose, Calif.) is betting that location-based multimedia applications such as 3D maps will become fashionable in cellphones and portable location devices. The company all plans for SiRFprima's multifunction engines to "all run in harmony" where most of its competitors tend to offer separate, dedicated function chips for GPS, multimedia processing and video decoding. When added to location-based services, 3G graphics becomes a "must-have" element.

Still, the GPS "attach rate" in mobile handsets remains relatively low. Although 70 percent of Qualcomm-supplied CDMA phones come with GPS, the navigation service is found in "less than 10 percent" of GSM phones according to SiRF - a situation they claim is changing quickly.

Beyond the Gphone, SiRF's competitors, NXP Semicondutors, Broadcom and CSR, have also been on a GPS shopping spree and Nokia's purchase of Navteq Corp., with a plan to move into the GPS and mapping services, offers perhaps more of a challenge than Google's Gphone.

The SiRFprima processor provides GPS location performance, including 64 channels with -161 dB sensitivity. The new engine is capable of simultaneously working with both the US GPS and European Galileo systems.

The platform's hardware-accelerated 3D graphics and multimedia encoding and decoding engines are based on the PowerVR MBX 3D graphics accelerator core, vertex geometry processor and PowerVR MVED1 video encode/decode accelerator from Imagination Technologies.

According to a SiRF spokesperson, SiRF has been quietly developing a wide range of multimedia and SoC capabilities over the last few years as part of a strategy to move beyond GPS. In support of that plan, SiRF's acquisitions include: Impulse Soft, for its Bluetooth stack; Kiesel Microelectronics of Sweden, a developer of multifunction radio capabilities designed by ex-Ericsson engineers; TrueSpan, for its mobile TV tuner and diversity OFDM engine; and Centrality Communications, which has SoC expertise to build functions around GPS engines.

SiRF's goal is to use its location engine to develop a platform for convergence devices, just as Qualcomm used its baseband modem as "an anchor" and Broadcom boosted sales with its communication engines.

Source: Based on a report in EETimes.com

www.eetimes.com/news/

Geo: International